


watch where you step

by prufrock



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: (sort of), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arson, BEEN WAITIN TO USE THAT TAG LADS, Brothers, Edward Elric Swears, Family Issues, Gen, Hurt Edward Elric, Hurt/Comfort, Lung Cancer, Mentions of Cancer, Panic Attacks, Parent Death, Parental Roy, Parental Roy Mustang, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Roy Mustang, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips, Stoner Ed Lives, Underage Drug Use, Vomiting, Wakes & Funerals, technically!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:22:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29972475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrock/pseuds/prufrock
Summary: Roy Mustang's perfectly happy, thank you very much, in his career as a chemical officer in the Army. Then he gets a call informing him that his long-absent father Hohenheim has died unexpectedly. When he goes to his younger half brothers' small rural town for funeral, he learns that a lot has changed in his absence, and discovers that his family needs him in ways he didn't know--and that he needs them.Or, Roy and Ed are half brothers with issues; there's a funeral, a child custody dilemma, a house fire, and a carload of angst.
Relationships: Edward Elric & Roy Mustang
Comments: 20
Kudos: 52





	1. the funeral

**Author's Note:**

> _"The question I'm asked most often about ants is 'What do I do about the ones in my kitchen?' And my answer is always the same: 'Watch where you step.' Be careful of little lives. Feed them crumbs of coffeecake. They also like bits of tuna and whipped cream. Get a magnifying glass. Watch them closely. And you will be as close as any person may ever come to seeing social life as it might evolve on another planet."_
> 
>   
> \-- Edward O. Wilson, "In the Company of Ants," 1996

Roy almost misses the call. 

It’s early morning, that odd hour between night and sunrise, and he’s just gotten back from his run. He checks his watch as he staggers in the door to the apartment complex; _eight miles, sixty-five minutes_. It could be worse, he tells himself. It could also be a lot better. He stretches against the mirrors in the hallway as he waits for the elevator, thinking about the field training exercises this weekend. Forty-eight hours of clueless cadets shitting themselves on his watch, and they’re predicting rain. Roy sighs as he lets himself into the apartment, crossing to the sink to lean down and gulp water from the tap. His calf muscles are cramping. The hem of his shorts is chafing at his thighs. This weekend is gonna _suck_. 

It’s not that he doesn’t like his job. He’s proud of what he does: top of his class at the academy; youngest colonel in the Chemical Corps in over a decade; on the team that helped develop a new chemical weapon that led to a decisive shift in overseas hostilities last year. Between diplomacy, research, and volunteer shifts at the fire department, he’s got a full schedule of all the things he’s best at. It’s just that spending two days in the mud with a bunch of teenagers getting his ass kicked by the elements isn’t his idea of a great weekend. 

He heads down the hall in the eerie half-light, peeling off his shirt as he goes. His roommate Riza’s door is ajar, which means she’s already out on her own run. She works in the office next to his, and she’s faster than him, which means she can get up later and still be out the door on time. There’s no clean towel hanging up, so he digs one out of the hamper, giving it a cautious sniff to make sure he’s not setting himself up for instant regret. It’s his turn to do laundry, but things keep coming up. He’ll do it later, he promises. 

He’s about to get into the shower when he hears the buzzing from the next room. He wraps the towel around himself and steps into his bedroom, fishing his phone out from the tangle of sheets where he dropped it an hour and a half ago. He doesn’t recognize the number, but the zip code’s out of state. Probably just a scam, he thinks. _Your vehicle’s warranty is about to run out. The Social Security Administration found suspicious activity on your record._ He picks up anyway. 

“Hello?” 

The voice on the other end is familiar, but he can’t place it. “Is this Roy Mustang?” It’s a woman, older, a smoker from the sounds of it. Roy racks his brain. 

“Speaking.” 

“This is Pinako Rockbell.” Again, the name jogs some kind of memory in Roy’s brain, but he can’t identify the source. “I have some bad news.” 

“Okay,” Roy says, hitching the towel a little higher on his hips. 

“Your father’s dead.” 

“Oh.”

The news doesn’t strike him in any particular way. He tries to remember the last time he saw Hohenheim, and he can’t, although he knows it must have been when he was a kid, back before he and Chris split up. Roy honestly doesn’t know much more about what his dad’s been up to since then. He married again a few years later and had two kids—Roy’s half brothers, technically. A few years after the second kid was born, the old man split, and he’s been in the wind since then. Last Roy heard, he was teaching philosophy at some college up north, but that could have been just a rumor. Roy’s never looked into it. 

And now he’s dead. 

“We got the news yesterday,” Pinako says, and now Roy’s putting the pieces together. She’s the boys’ neighbor, the tiny old lady who he met at Trisha’s funeral seven years ago; the boys live with her and her granddaughter. “I’m having the body shipped down for the funeral here on Monday. Thought you ought to know, in case nobody else told you already.” 

“Thanks,” Roy says. He feels weird having this conversation without any underwear on. He’s running calculations in his head: the FTX is gonna make it hard. Roy’s known guys who went to an FTX with pneumonia and appendicitis, and they just puked their way through and went to the hospital later. So a funeral for a guy he hasn’t talked to in years—there’s no way he was getting a pass. But if the funeral’s Monday, he ought to be able to get a flight out Sunday night. It’ll suck, but he can probably swing it if he has to. 

Emerging from the logistics, his brain catches up with what she just said. “Shipped from where?” 

“Maine,” she says. “He was living up there in a cabin, apparently. Teaching at some college in Portland.” Roy is starting to get the sense he’s not the only person who’s had no clue where his dad was the last several years. 

“What happened?” 

“Coroner said heart failure.” Pinako’s voice is flat. “He was old. It just happens.” 

In Roy’s memories, Hohenheim is a beard and a rusty voice; it seems like he was always old. “Okay,” he says. “That’s—” He doesn’t know the right word. It’s not terrible. It’s not sad. The word that actually comes to mind is _boring_ , but it feels wrong to say that. “That’s good to know,” he says finally. 

“Like I said,” she says. “Just thought you ought to know. Oh, and—” She pauses. “I got a call from his lawyer. There’s a will.” 

“A will?” Roy was under the impression that the old man was broke. The checks to Chris stopped years ago, well before Roy turned eighteen. She’d given up hounding him for cash after the fourth letter came back with a damn novel attached about how rough he had it. 

“Yep,” Pinako confirms. “No idea what’s in it. But you are.” 

“I am?” He feels exceptionally stupid right now, just repeating everything she says back to her as a question. “Oh. And—Ed and Al?” 

“Them too,” Pinako says. “The three of you. All his kids.” There’s a grim tone to her voice that Roy can’t read. 

“Okay,” Roy says. So there’s no way around it: he’s got to go. He’ll figure out the how once he’s not naked. “And how are they? Ed and Al.” He hasn’t seen them since the accident; he feels bad, sometimes, about ignoring them, but he never knows what to say or how to help. Ed hates his guts for reasons Roy can only partially understand, and they barely know each other anyway. 

Pinako scoffs. “Ed’s fine. Told him what happened and he said ‘great.’ Al’s okay. Are you coming?” 

“Yes,” Roy tells her. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to—yes, I’ll come. I’ll call you when I’ve got a flight.” 

“Fair enough,” she says, and hangs up. 

Roy looks at the phone in his hand for a minute. It’s still open to the weather app from when he checked before his run. He stares at the little row of rain clouds stretching out over the next week. He wonders if it’ll rain out in Rizembul. 

He showers, thinking about the long, cold drive from the airport last time; about the empty house on the hill where he spent a week taking casseroles from strangers. He scrubs at his itchy scalp, feeling the sweat of his run rinse off him as he thinks about his dad, alone in a cabin north of nowhere, reading his damn books and writing a will for a kid he hasn’t bothered to call in going on fifteen years.

When he gets out of the shower, Riza’s back. He can hear her moving around the kitchen while he gets dressed, the blender whirring as she makes her post-run smoothie. He finds her sitting at the counter, cheeks flushed from the morning chill, backed by a wall of golden light from the living room window. The sun’s up for real now. 

“Hey,” she says, looking up. “How was your run?” 

“Eight miles,” Roy says, and then, because it feels weird not to mention it, “my dad died.” 

“Oh,” she says. There’s no burst of perfunctory sympathy; she’s waiting for him to tell her how he wants her to feel about it. 

“It’s—not exactly a surprise.” He shrugs. “I didn’t really know him. My mom and him, they split up years ago. I was eight, I think?” This is more than he’s told her about his personal life before. She never asked; he never brought it up. They’re private people. It’s one of the things that makes them good roommates. “But I’m gonna fly out for the funeral. I’ll be gone for a few days, I guess.”

Riza’s nodding. “That makes sense,” she says, stirring her smoothie thoughtfully. “My dad died a few years ago. It was complicated.” She doesn’t elaborate. 

“I think I’ll be flying out Sunday night,” he tells her. “And then coming back—I don’t know yet. The funeral’s Monday. I might have to stay a little longer. There’s a will, I guess.” He scans the pantry shelves for something that could pass as breakfast; he’s already gonna be late to the office if he doesn’t leave in the next five minutes. 

“Just let me know,” she says, standing up. “I’m gonna go shower.”

Roy grabs a power bar and sticks it in his pocket; it’ll be breakfast or lunch—whichever one he has the time for. “We’re out of clean towels,” he tells Riza. “Sorry.” 

Riza nods, taking this information in stride. “I’ll do it later. Your dad died.” 

She disappears down the hall, and Roy heads out to the car. He turns that last sentence over in his mind as he takes the familiar turns out to the base: _your dad died_. He wonders if he’s gonna have a delayed reaction later, but he suspects he won’t. In a backwards way, it feels like the guy dying is a delayed reaction, the footnote to something else. Roy’s already incorporated the news into his universe. 

It’s not Hohenheim who’s on his mind as he drives. It’s Ed and Al. The two kids have been a weird little file at the back of Roy’s consciousness for the last ten years or so, ever since he found out they existed. Ed’s got to be about sixteen now, which would make Al fifteen. 

On paper, their relationship’s simple. Half brothers, linked by a dad whose greatest skill was disappearing; biological relations without a whole lot of social fabric holding them together. Chris raised Roy on her own up in Washington, and that was all the family he ever needed. When he was about fifteen and found out that his dad had a new girlfriend and a couple of kids out in the country, it was trivia. 

But then, his senior year at Old Dominion, Ed and Al were in the car with their mom going down I-77 when a drunk driver spun out of his lane and smashed sideways into the minivan at 70 miles per hour. Trisha died at the scene. Al, who was sitting on the same side of the car, was paralyzed from the chest down, and Ed’s right arm and left leg were crushed beyond repair. 

Roy can still remember where he was—the farthest booth from the door at the old diner where he used to hole up before midterms—when his phone rang. He can still hear the nurse’s voice on the phone: _Al’s condition is extremely critical. We’re trying to get ahold of the father._

Well, he hadn’t been any help with that. He had the same number they did, the same number Pinako had already given them, the number that always went to the same answering service with no reply. 

He still doesn’t know what it was that made him get in the car and drive out. Sympathy, guilt, maybe some kind of naive belief in the power of family, or whatever. He’d never met Ed and Al, but they were brothers, sort of. He was the one who made most of the arrangements for their mom’s funeral, while Pinako was at the hospital with the boys, waiting to hear if Ed would keep his leg and if Al would ever wake up. Roy stayed at the house for a week, helping out and fielding calls and sitting up late watching the nature shows that seemed to be the only thing on TV out there. 

It was what families do, he told himself at the time. Any decent person would have done the same. But now he wonders. If it was hubris, not decency. Or just anger at their dad, anger so old he’d all but forgotten it. Either way, it didn’t change anything. At the end of the week Ed lost the leg, Al woke up in a body that couldn’t move, and Roy drove back to the city. 

He hasn’t been out to visit since. He feels bad about that. He’s called a few times, but it’s not as if they have a lot to say to each other. All Roy really knows how to talk about is chemical weapons, and it’s not exactly kid-friendly stuff. So the calls dropped off a few years ago, and it’s been radio silence on both ends. Until now. 

Now, Roy realizes, he’s Ed and Al’s only living family. Even at their mom’s funeral, there were no uncles or aunts, no cousins, no grandparents on the scene. Just the neighbors, and Roy. 

So, ready or not, he’s going back. 

* * *

  
  


The saddest part of this whole day, Roy thinks, is the damn decor at the funeral home. The carpet shows _everything._ It looks like it was probably laid down in the 70s—when else was emerald green shag carpet in vogue? Roy’s pretty sure he’s looking at four decades of footsteps, grease spots, and crumbs from cookie trays. 

Who the hell puts green carpet in a funeral home? 

He closes his eyes, pressing his finger and thumb against his aching eyelids. He’s standing in the hallway next to a row of strangers’ coats, taking a minute to breathe before heading back in to talk to strangers who knew the stranger who was his dad. It’s going on twelve hours since his red-eye got in, and between the florist and the Food Lion, and then the burial, there hasn't been a chance to rest. Not that Ed let him help with any of that. 

“Hey, asshole.” Roy opens his eyes; Ed’s in the doorway now, stiff and prickly in his borrowed shirt and tie. He’s glaring at Roy. “You’re supposed to be in there,” he says.

“I’m coming,” Roy says, and Ed huffs, rolls his eyes, and disappears again. 

He decides to take a detour to the bathroom on his way back, because fuck Ed. Ed’s been, to be frank, a pain in his ass the entire time he’s been back here, and he hasn’t been in town for a full day yet. It would have been two days if it wasn’t for the damn field training exercise. He knows Ed’s mad about that, but he also knows that even if he hadn’t had to delay his flight, Ed would have found something else to be mad about. So he goes to find the bathroom, and to take a damn minute before he goes back. 

The bathroom’s a tiny box of a room painted in a shade of yellow that’s probably supposed to be cheerful, but just seems to accentuate the smell of urinal cakes. There’s a little vase of plastic flowers perched on the sink basin. Roy turns the faucet on, and holds his hand underneath the weak flow, waiting for it to get hot or cold or anything. It doesn’t. He stands there for a long time, hand in the water, staring into space. 

He doesn’t know why he came here. The service was the strangest, shortest piece of ceremony Roy’s ever seen: a handful of verses read out of a Bible he’s pretty confident his dad didn’t believe in, and some guy playing “Danny Boy” on a recorder while the officiant led everyone in a moment of silent remembrance that seemed to outlast the actual service. Nobody else spoke. Nobody cried. 

Ed’s the same as Roy remembers from their phone conversations: loud voice, short fuse. He doesn’t want Roy here, and he’s made no secret of that fact. Al’s different. Roy knows him as a shy voice over the phone and an outdated picture of a chubby five-year-old standing on a porch. In person, he’s not shy at all, and he’s taller than Ed. Together, they seem to operate as a single body in two parts, communicating through some symbiotic sixth sense. Roy’s realizing, the longer he’s here, that they don’t need another brother. 

The door opens, jarring him out of his self-absorbed reverie. It’s some squat old guy Roy didn’t recognize at the service, with a thick waist and grizzled mustache. He crosses to the urinal, grunting as he unzips, and Roy takes that as his cue to go, shutting the water off and wiping his hands on his pants as he hurries out. 

He follows the hectic buzz of conversation down the hall to the reception. It’s a big wood-paneled room filled with people he doesn’t know, people from town and from his dad’s late girlfriend’s church, eating grocery store sandwiches and dry cookies off of two big folding tables. It smells like potpourri and Saran wrap. Roy moves toward the margin of the room, dodging sympathetic glances. 

“So you decided to show your face again.” _Crap._ He didn’t see Ed there in the corner. He’s sitting backwards on a folding chair, his chin propped on his folded arms along the backrest, left leg stretched out awkwardly to the side. 

“I guess so,” Roy says. He wishes he’d at least gotten some punch or a sandwich. Something to hold, something to do with his hands. 

Ed seems to be able to hear his thoughts. “What, you’re not hungry?” 

Roy shrugs. “Not really.” He glances at Ed, who’s rubbing his leg just above the knee, right around where the prosthetic meets the stump. Roy’s never seen it, but he knows the approximate position. Ed’s been on his feet since 5 AM; he’s got to be in pain by now. “What about you?” Roy asks. “You want me to get you something?”

He meant it honestly—call it a peace offering of sorts—but Ed snaps upright like Roy challenged him to a fight. “Fuck off.”

“I just meant—”

“I don’t need your _help_.” Ed pulls himself up on the chair back, wobbling a little as he steps around it, and stomps over to the table. He grabs a sandwich off one of the trays, plops it onto a little plastic plate, and comes back, dropping onto the chair with enough force that it sways under his insignificant weight. 

“Okay,” Roy says. He’s not getting involved. He’s not touching this with a ten foot pole. 

“So,” Ed says, setting the sandwich aside on the floor, “you killed anyone lately?” 

“Very funny.” Roy watches a little girl he doesn’t know tug a lily out of one of the heavy vases ringing the room and start ripping its petals off. “I’m in an advisory role.” 

“Oh, right,” Ed says. “How could I forget, you just _advise_ people on how to kill people.” 

Roy changes the subject. “How’s school?” 

Ed swivels his head around to squint up at Roy. “That’s really what you wanna know? ‘How’s school?’ You sound like a grandma.” 

“I’m making conversation. It’s considered polite. You should try it sometime.”

“Screw you.” 

Roy chooses to ignore that. “How’s Al?” He’s looking around the room, but he can’t see Al, and the kid’s hard to miss with the wheelchair. 

“He’s _fine_.” Ed’s glare looks painful. “He was getting a migraine. He went back to the house.”

“I meant—in general, he’s doing okay?” 

“Why _wouldn’t_ he be?” Roy guesses he doesn’t have a good answer to that. 

Ed’s about to say something when a woman in a navy blue cardigan and sensible shoes comes over to offer them condolences. Ed seems to know her, because he modifies his bratty attitude and musters something close to a genuine “thanks.” 

Roy sees the hesitation as she turns to him. “And you’re—” 

He’s noticed it already. Everyone here knows he’s _somebody_ —he was in the front row with Ed and Al during the service, after all; graveside at the burial—but the specifics of who and what he is, with respect to the old man, haven’t made it to the status of public knowledge. “I’m Ed and Al’s half brother,” Roy explains, and sees Ed grimace. 

“Ah,” the woman says, understanding and pity and curiosity mingling plainly on her face. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” 

Roy thanks her, and she melts back into the crowd of people swarming around the refreshment tables. “Who was that?” he asks Ed. 

Ed shrugs. “Mrs. Ross. She teaches math at the middle school.” He gnaws at a fingernail, spitting the torn shard onto the nasty carpet. “Al likes her.” He must see Roy running mental calculations, because he adds, “Al’s in tenth grade, asshole.” 

“I didn’t say he wasn’t.” 

“You were thinking it.” Ed stretches. “How much longer do we have to hang out here?” 

“An hour or so, I guess,” Roy says. “Maybe two.” Saying it, he feels exhaustion tugging insistently behind his eyes. He has to suppress a yawn. 

Ed doesn’t miss it. “You’re bored? My dad’s funeral is boring you?” 

“You were the one just complaining about having to stay here,” Roy points out. “And he was my dad too.”

Ed’s quiet for a minute, staring at the carpet. A burly guy in a visibly rented suit and a tired-looking woman with two little kids fighting over a stuffed Elmo toy come by to give their condolences, and Roy reverts to formality, shaking hands and nodding with a solemn sorrow he doesn’t really feel while Ed talks to the kids. It’s moderately disorienting, trying to project the right emotions in the right manner without coming off as weird. He wonders if the sleep deprivation is making it worse. He wonders if he’s acting like an asshole. 

More people start coming by; the supply of sandwiches and cookies is dwindling, and people are ready to think about death again. Roy finds himself developing a script: _thank you, nice to meet you, I appreciate that, thank you for coming._ There’s a little line building, stretching off away from the spot where Ed and Roy are stationed. Ed sits up straighter, nodding and shaking hands and putting on a serious face, but he doesn’t stand up, which tells Roy that he was right; Ed’s leg really is hurting. 

“I’ve got ibuprofen in my bag,” he comments when the stream of people tapers off for a minute. “You want some?” 

Ed shakes his head. “I’ve got ibuprofen, dumbass.” 

A woman with dark hair gathered in a messy bun comes over. “How you holding up, Ed?” she asks. No condolences, Roy notices. 

“This is a drag,” Ed tells her. Roy detects the ghost of a smile on her face. She turns to him, an oddly stern look of sympathy replacing the smile. 

“Izumi Curtis,” she says, holding out her hand. “You’re Roy?” 

She’s the first person here to recognize him. “Yes,” he says, accepting the handshake. “Thank you for coming.” 

She nods. “How long are you in town for?” 

Ed’s watching him. Roy chooses his words carefully. “A couple of days.” Long enough to wrap up all the legal business and make sure the kids are set up. Not long enough, he hopes, to start a fight. 

“Glad to hear it,” she says. “If there’s anything you boys need, Sig and I are right down the road.” 

There’s something strange about hearing himself included in _you boys,_ here in this town where nobody knows him, where everything about him announces that he doesn’t belong. “Thank you, ma’am.” 

“Who’s she?” he asks Ed when she’s gone. Ed’s picked up the sandwich he abandoned on the floor earlier, stripping the limp bread off to pick out the cheese. 

“Mrs. Curtis? You heard her, she lives down the road. She’s a neighbor.” 

“She knew who I am,” Roy points out. “Nobody else here does. You two seem to know each other pretty well.” 

“Why do you care?” Ed demands, his mouth full of cheese. 

Roy feels frustration sparking in his chest. “I’m interested. I’m trying to be—” Not _a good brother._ “—friendly.” 

“ _Friendly_ ,” Ed repeats thoughtfully, tossing the sandwich remains back onto the plate. He contemplates them for a minute, chewing his nails again. “She did PT with me when I got my arm and leg,” he says finally. “She works with Al a lot.”

Roy wasn’t expecting a reply. “Oh,” he says. “I see.” 

“You see _what_?”

Roy doesn’t know what to say. “I can see why you’d be close.” 

“Stop trying to act like you know anything about us,” Ed says. His voice is flat and a little too loud. “Just because you—” 

He doesn’t finish the sentence. An old man with watery eyes comes over and clasps Roy’s hand in both of his, murmuring his regret in a voice clogged with age and emotion. Roy goes through his little script as the man speaks, feeling the hollow sensation in his chest expand. 

Nobody seems to have much to say about Hohenheim, he’s noticed. He is, ostensibly, the reason all of them are here, but the old man’s memory has been strangely absent from his own funeral: no eulogy at the service, no words of fond remembrance from the train of people dropping by with their condolences. Roy’s starting to wonder if there’s _anyone_ at this funeral who really knew the guy. The old man gripping Ed’s hand now is doing what most of the mourners have done: talking about his mom, instead. 

“Trisha really loved him,” he’s saying, and Roy can see the effort of not punching the guy on Ed’s face. Even Roy, who feels like he steps on a land mine every other sentence with Ed, knows better than to say _that_ to him. 

When the man walks away, Ed drops his chin to the chair back again, resting it on his crossed arms. He looks drained. For the first time today, he doesn’t have a smart comment lined up to throw at Roy; he’s just staring into space, eyes unfocused and a little vacant. Roy feels bad for the kid. But he’s got nothing to offer, no idea of what to say that wouldn’t just piss Ed off. 

The crowd’s starting to thin out. The sun’s going down, and people are getting tired, turning back towards their own lives, their waiting homes and families. The cookie platters are empty. People swing by to say goodbye, announcing their departure in vaguely apologetic tones, patting Ed on the shoulder and shaking Roy’s hand. Eventually, it’s just the two of them, staring at the empty room as the funeral home staff start taking down the tables and ushering away the vases, clearing out space for the next funeral. 

“Did he ever talk to you?” Ed asks abruptly. He’s studying the carpet, chin resting on his hand. 

Roy isn’t sure what Ed’s asking. He figures he means Hohenheim. “About what?” 

Ed shrugs. “Anything. School. His work. Politics, golf, I don’t fucking know.” He runs his hand through his hair, sighing sharply. “I mean, he sure as hell didn’t talk to us, but maybe he was secretly a really good dad behind our backs.” 

“Oh,” Roy says. He tries to remember the last time the old man called him. “No. He wasn’t.” 

“Yeah,” Ed says. “I figured.” 

Pinako drives them home, out into the hills to the little house on the ridge where Roy’s phone doesn’t get service. Nobody says anything on the ride. Ed’s silent in the front seat, staring out the window with his foot propped up on the dash, and Pinako isn’t the talkative type. 

The Rockbells’ house is a squat yellow split-level with a motorcycle repair shop and a screened-in porch, sitting at the end of the longest, muddiest driveway Roy’s ever seen. Ed disappears upstairs immediately, leaving Roy alone in the kitchen with Pinako and about twelve assorted casseroles. 

“Hungry?” she asks him. “Eat something. We got all this to use up.” She doesn’t stay to watch him eat. 

Roy isn’t actually hungry, or he doesn’t feel hungry. He just wants to find the guest room where he left his duffle bag earlier and pass out. But he knows he hasn’t eaten since last night, and there’s all this casserole, and he’s acutely aware that he’s a guest in this house, and only a marginally welcome one. So he finds a plate in the cupboard, and he has some casserole. When he’s done, he washes the dish carefully, dries it, and puts it back where he found it. Like he was never here. 

The guest room is at the top of the stairs, the last door on the right. Roy passes a half-open door on the way and hears Ed’s voice, soft and indistinct, talking to somebody Roy can’t see. _Not so bad_ , Roy catches. _Missed you_. Roy wishes, suddenly, that he could text Riza. 

He can’t; there’s no service here. Whatever cell towers his number pings off of, they’re out of range at Pinako Rockbell’s house. Instead, he follows his exhaustion down the hallway and into the featureless guest room, where he falls face first onto a quilt a stranger made, tasting cotton and mothballs. He rolls over onto his back and sits up long enough to strip off his jacket and nudge the door shut with an outstretched toe, then tips backwards onto the pillows and into oblivion. 

* * *

When he wakes up, the sun’s pushing at the corners of the room and there’s a bad taste in his mouth. He gives himself a minute to collect his thoughts, then pushes up to sit on the side of the bed. He checks his watch: _8:24_. He can’t remember the last time he slept this late. 

He roots around in the bag he packed in a hurry back at the apartment and finds some clothes that aren’t a slept-in funeral suit. Somewhere on the floor below, he can smell coffee. 

He wanders downstairs, hoping to locate the source of the smell, and finds Al instead. He’s in the living room, watching some nature channel on the staticky TV, and he doesn’t seem to notice Roy immediately; his chair’s angled slightly away from the stairs. 

“Good morning,” he says, and Roy realizes the kid’s got better peripheral vision than he thought. 

“Good morning.” He steps closer. He can see Al studying him, sizing him up. He’s not sure what test he’s being put to right now, but he hopes he passes. 

“Sorry I left early yesterday,” Al says finally, a half-smile twisting his mouth. “I had a really bad headache. Didn’t mean to leave you stranded with Ed.”

“Oh,” Roy lies, “it wasn’t so bad.” 

Al gives him a knowing look. “Ed’s still asleep,” he says. “Probably will be for another hour, at least. And Granny’s out with Winry on a service call.” He nods towards the kitchen. “She made coffee before she left, if you want some.” 

Roy follows Al’s nod and finds a nearly full pot sitting on the burner. He pours himself a mug, taking a few cautious sips and topping the difference up. The coffee’s good: whoever made this knew what they were doing. It’s been a while since he drank his coffee black—it reminds him of all-nighters back at Old Dominion with Hughes—but there’s no evidence of cream in the fridge, and Roy figures he can make do if it means getting the caffeine he missed out on yesterday. He already feels more human. 

He brings his coffee back out into the living room, where Al is still watching TV. He looks up when Roy comes in, an awkward smile on his face. 

“This show isn’t very good,” he says. “I’ve seen it before. But, you know—” He shrugs. “It’s on.”

Roy nods. He remembers sitting on Al’s mom’s couch seven years ago, not that much older than Al is now, watching episode after episode of those damn nature shows. It was what was on. He takes a sip of his coffee, listening to the narrator on the TV talk about migratory patterns. 

Al’s watching him. “I’m not mad at you, you know.” 

Roy wasn’t expecting that. “Huh,” he says. “Good to know.” 

“Ed is.” 

“Could’ve fooled me.” Roy sighs, rubbing his temples. He looks up at Al with curiosity. “Why _is_ Ed mad at me?” 

“I don’t really know,” Al says. Roy has the sense that he’s not quite lying, but he’s not quite saying what he’s thinking, either. “He’s not talking to me much right now. I don’t think he’s talking to anybody but Winry.” 

“He had a lot to say yesterday.” 

Al shakes his head. “He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.” His face splits into a sudden grin. “He’s good at that.” 

“Good with me, or good at that in general?”

Al snorts. “Both.” 

“Fair enough.” Roy likes Al. He’s a smart kid—like his brother, but without the constant hostility and the ten-ton chip on his shoulder. There’s a lot Roy wants to ask him, but he doesn’t know where to start. He’s a stranger here, after all, passing through Al’s life for the second time with no idea of what’s happened since his last visit. He can hear Ed’s voice in his head: _Stop trying to act like you know anything about us_. 

In the end, he decides to just ask. “Listen, you and Ed—is Ms. Rockbell your legal guardian?” 

Al looks up at him in surprise. “Granny?” He shakes his head. “She’s Winry’s grandmother, but we’re not related. She was Dad’s friend, I think, actually, way back—that’s how he and Mom met.” Roy doesn’t miss the little shadow of grief that passes over his face; Ed’s not the only one feeling that old wound right now. “Why?”

Roy sighs. “You two are minors. Ed for two more years, you for three. Someone’s got to take guardianship, or the state will step in.” He sounds like a textbook. 

“Why?” Al asks. “Dad was never here before. It’s not like anything’s changed.” Roy thinks about Ed at the funeral home yesterday: _maybe he was secretly a really good dad. Behind our backs._ “Ed and I take care of ourselves,” Al says. When he sets his jaw like that, he looks just like Ed. 

“It’s not about that,” Roy tries to explain. “It’s about—someone has to take legal responsibility.” 

“No, I get it,” Al says. “I just disagree.” He meets Roy’s eyes calmly. Roy is very aware, suddenly, that he’s the only one in this conversation who hasn’t fully thought this through. 

“Okay,” he soldiers on, “but we have to deal with it one way or another. It’s not just the legal stuff; there’s a financial issue, too. Did you ever get checks from him?” 

Al’s eyebrows draw down at that, an angry little flush set off in his cheeks. “Yeah,” he says. “Every few months. Ed doesn’t like it.” 

No, Roy can imagine he wouldn’t. “So was I,” he says, “for a while, before I turned eighteen. The law says he’s got to support his kids. But—”

“But the money’s gonna stop now,” Al says. “I know. I figured that, when I heard he was dead.” He’s nodding thoughtfully. “I can’t get a job,” he says. “Not here. Not—” He shrugs, looking down at his skinny knees. “There’s not a lot of work for anyone around here. And it’s mostly McDonald’s, or running the counter at the hardware store. Stuff like that. I couldn’t do it.” 

Roy nods. “And you’re fifteen,” he reminds Al, who seems to have forgotten. “You have to go to school, both of you. You shouldn’t have to support yourselves.” He doesn’t bother pointing out the bleak chances of supporting two kids, both of whom have to have pretty steep medical expenses, on the income from a job at the local Bojangles or Handy Dan’s. If he was teaching at a college, like Pinako said, then Hohenheim’s checks were coming out of a salary. There’s no way whatever part-time job Ed can find will make up the difference. 

“Look,” he says slowly, “I’m working for the army. I make good money, I’ve got a roommate, so if—”

“No.” Al shakes his head. There’s a forbidding look in his eye. “No,” he repeats, and that’s it. 

Roy gives up, for the moment. He’s frustrated. He doesn’t know how to talk to these kids, and he doesn’t know how to help them other than that, and money. He’s acutely aware of how much it must cost this kid just to live, and Roy’s sitting here with an intact spinal cord and fifteen thousand in the bank that he’s spending on bad liquor and fancy pens and post-shave balm he used once and forgot about. 

He goes to pour himself another cup of coffee and decides to put his frustration into cleaning up the kitchen, which is where Ed finds him when he stumbles downstairs an hour later, wearing tight black jeans and a red hoodie that’s big enough to almost reach his knees and ratty enough that Roy wonders if it ever gets washed. 

“You’re still here?” he asks Roy, pouring the last of the coffee for himself and immediately dumping out the grounds to start a fresh pot. 

Roy doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to that. “Yeah.” 

Ed sighs, hauling himself up to sit on the counter. “Why?” He crosses his arms. “I thought you had, like, a crazy important job. Don’t you have some kind of cop shit to do?” 

“Army, not police,” Roy says. “And I’m taking PTO. We have to see the lawyers about the will today.” He rinses off the pan he’s been scrubbing, and rests it on the drying rack. “I’ll fly back tomorrow.” 

Ed frowns. “What’s the deal with that, anyway? I thought the old man was broke.” 

“So did I.” Roy shrugs. “I guess we’ll see.” 

A few hours later, Roy drives them into town. The offices of Nelson, Bells & Shanks, Attorneys at Law are located in the strip mall out on County Route 48, in between the Great Wall restaurant and a toy store with a stuffed giraffe leaning drunkenly in the window. Roy parks out front, and waits while Ed and Al manage the ramp. It’s an oddly chilly day, one of those late bursts of winter that come on the heels of May. Across the parking lot, a group of seagulls are ripping into a soggy box of fish sticks somebody must have dropped on their way to the car from the Dollar General. 

Inside, the office is surprisingly nice: the walls are smooth cream wallpaper, with dark wood molding and tile that looks like, but probably isn’t, marble. A freckled blonde girl in a navy blazer looks them up in her Outlook calendar and waves them to a ring of leather chairs. “I’ll go tell Dad you’re here.” 

Brian Nelson doesn’t look like the lawyers Roy’s used to. Roy’s used to military lawyers, guys built for the golf course with tailoring they don’t appreciate and sunglasses that cost more than their cars. Brian Nelson is a dad with a patchy beard and a scruffy mustache, built like an ancient refrigerator, and his Southern accent slips out in each lazy vowel. He introduces himself to them each individually, with a slow, firm handshake and eye contact that’s slightly intimidating in its intensity. 

“Now,” he says, once he’s led them into his office, “I understand you all are here to inquire about your father’s will.” 

“That’s right,” Roy says. 

“Let me find my things,” Nelson says, shuffling through the stacks of paper on his desk and pulling a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket. The office is buried in folders and loose forms; the filing cabinets on the wall are overflowing, and Roy thinks he sees a 2007 calendar on the wall, half-obscured by a row of perilously leaning binders. He’s surprised when it takes Nelson under two minutes to hunt down Hohenheim’s will. 

“Here we are,” he announces, scooping up the pages and tapping them even on the desk. “Van Hohenheim. Deceased April 7, 2015.” 

“That’s the guy,” Ed growls. 

“It’s a short document,” Nelson says. “And I should tell you right now that there’s no financial provision.” He looks at them over his glasses. “It seems your father died with about three hundred dollars in his bank account. That’s gone to the funeral costs already.” 

Roy wasn’t expecting enough for this to register as a disappointment, but he can tell Al’s worried, and Ed’s pissed. “So what,” he says, frowning, “it’s just—stuff? What did the old guy even _have_?” 

“The bulk of the document,” Nelson says, “contains your father’s last wishes. That’s pretty standard,” he explains, “in cases where the deceased doesn’t have a lot to leave in the form of wealth or earthly possessions.” He sounds like a preacher. Roy thinks he’d have done a better job delivering the service than the skinny funeral director from yesterday. 

Ed leans back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head. “I don’t give a fuck about that guy’s wishes,” he announces, as if anyone in the room had any doubt of that.” 

Al rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a dick, Ed.” 

Nelson nods appreciatively in Al’s direction before he goes on. “I will warn you,” he says, “this particular provision is gonna require some further legal processing. It has to do with the matter of guardianship for his minor children.” 

Ed sits up again abruptly, a wary look on his face. “That’s us.” 

Nelson nods. “Your father expressed a wish that guardianship pass to his other surviving child.” His eyes, moving behind the uneven frames of his reading glasses, slide over to rest on Roy. “That’s you, as I understand.” 

Roy has a sudden urge to lean across the desk and take the paper out of the man’s hand, just to make sure he didn’t pick up the wrong will. “Excuse me?” 

Nelson seems to understand. He pushes his glasses up a little further, and reads out, in a gentle voice nothing like the hoarse mumble Roy remembers from those last few phone calls: “I appoint Roy Mustang guardian of my children, Edward and Alphonse.” He holds the paper out for Roy to see for himself. 

Ed snatches it away before Roy can look. He holds the paper up to his face, squinting furiously. “ _Bull_ shit.” It doesn’t appear to be a typo, though, because after a minute’s intense reading, he tosses the paper back onto the desk. “And what if we say no?” 

Nelson seems prepared for the question. “You can file an objection,” he says. “The court will need to approve Mr. Mustang before anything else. They’ll want to know about his financial assets, his physical fitness, and his moral character. If he doesn’t pass in all of those respects, you’ll be appointed a different guardian by the state. And, if you don’t think he’s fit to be your guardian, the judge will take your preference into consideration.” 

“Great,” Ed says flatly. “He’s not.” 

Nelson doesn’t blink. “The judge will decide.” 

“Okay,” Roy says. He’s trying to catch up, trying to juggle the twelve different feelings at war in his stomach. He’s got no idea why the old man would do this. He’s ignored all three of them for years. Roy was almost surprised to learn that Hohenheim still remembered that he existed, and now he’s appointing him Ed and Al’s guardian? “I don’t live here,” he says. “I’m stationed out in Missouri—Fort Leonard Wood. I mean, is that a problem?” 

“Not necessarily.” Nelson picks up a letter opener and taps it on the desk as he speaks. “Your responsibilities as a legal guardian would include providing shelter and housing, but it’s not a strict requirement that you share a residence, as long as the minors—you two gentlemen, I mean—are housed with a trustworthy adult.” He looks back at Roy. “It really comes down to the court’s approval. If you’ve got a clean record, if you’ve got the financial capability to support your brothers, you’d be eligible whatever your residency.” 

“We’re not his brothers,” Ed snarls. 

“Apologies,” Nelson says. “Now, I can see you folks are gonna need to talk some things over. You’ll have some time to decide how you want to go about this, but we’ll want to get that paperwork rolling as soon as we can. In the meantime,” he says, picking up the next page of the will, “there’s the matter of the cabin.” 

“The cabin?” Al asks. 

“The cabin,” Nelson says, “yes. Your father owned a cabin in North Yarmouth, up in Maine. It ain’t much of a property,” he says frankly. “About four hundred square feet, and my understanding is it’s old. But he’s leaving it to the three of you, and it’ll be yours to do what you’d like with it.” 

“I don’t want it,” Ed says without hesitation. 

“In that case,” Nelson says, “I suggest you try to sell it. That is, if you two agree.” 

Roy doesn’t care. He’s starting to feel like this will is some kind of sick joke: their dad’s pranking him from the afterlife, saddling him with all the responsibilities he didn’t care to deal with while he was alive. 

Nelson goes over the paperwork with them and gives them his number to follow up. They leave in silence, not looking at each other. As soon as they’re in the car, Ed says, “Fuck this.” 

“We have to think about it, Ed,” Al says. He sounds tired. “We have to look at all the options.” 

“I’m not looking at shit,” Ed says. 

Al just shrugs. He’s looking out the window, to the corner of the parking lot where the gulls have found a new horde of trash. His face is a blank, expressionless except for the little line of concentration between his eyebrows. He looks older than Ed, Roy thinks. You could give Roy a million dollars right now, and he wouldn’t be able to tell you what that kid was thinking. 

That night, over reheated casserole around the kitchen table, Pinako asks what the lawyer said. Roy senses the tension that’s been sitting over the house all afternoon expanding, filling the room with a static energy he can almost feel. For a minute, nobody says anything. 

Al’s the one who finally speaks up. “Dad left us a cabin in Maine,” he says. “Mr. Nelson said it’s not a very good property, so we’ll probably have to sell it.” He’s poking at his tuna casserole with the fork fixed to his wrist brace, not looking at anyone as he talks. 

“That right?” Pinako asks, looking at Roy. 

“Yes,” Roy says, swallowing his mouthful of ziti. “I don’t know what Ed and Al want to do, but I think—I mean, I don’t have any use for it.” 

“I don’t want it,” Ed says, not looking up from his plate. “It sounds like a shithole.” 

“I think the lawyer’s right,” Al says. “It makes most sense for us to sell it.”

“You’ll need to go up there, then,” Pinako says. “Go through his things, make sure it’s cleaned up to show. Knowing him,” she says, a little fondness coming through her gruff tone, “it’ll need it.” 

“I can go,” Roy says. “Once we’ve got the details from the lawyer.” 

“Good,” Pinako says, nodding. She looks around the table, her gaze pausing on Ed, who’s shoveling scalloped potatoes into his mouth with an air of grim determination. “What else,” she says. “There’s more, isn’t there.” It’s not a question.

“Yes, ma’am,” Roy says. “Hohenheim wants me to be appointed Ed and Al’s legal guardian.” He hears Winry gasp beside him; Ed’s scowl deepens. 

Pinako puts down her silverware. Roy can’t read the expression on her face. “And you’re willing to do that?” 

Roy has no idea what to say. He can’t think of an answer that won’t be in some way wrong. Even if there was no chance of starting a fight here, he doesn’t even know what it is that he wants. He just knows he didn’t come here planning to become anyone’s surrogate father. 

Ed, of all people, saves him from having to answer. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s not his choice. The courts get to decide.” He’s still chewing, talking around two bites at once. 

Pinako turns to him. “Is that true?” Ed shrugs. 

Once again, it’s Al who speaks up. “The lawyer said we can object, if we want to. But Ed’s right, it’s the court’s decision.” He lifts his gaze and looks at Pinako, at Ed, at Winry. He doesn’t look at Roy. Roy has the feeling maybe he’s been struck invisible for this conversation. “We have a few weeks to think about it,” he adds. “Figure out the options.” Ed’s grinding his teeth. 

“Well,” Pinako says. “Well.” She picks up her fork again, eyeing Roy curiously. “I guess we’ll have to talk about that.”

Roy feels like he should apologize. Hohenheim was her friend. She actually _knew_ the guy, more than anybody else at this table. She’s the one who’s been taking care of Ed and Al for years: putting a roof over their heads, keeping them fed, paying their medical bills. Nobody asked her to do that. Hohenheim _must_ have known she’d taken them in. So why Roy? 

_I don’t know why,_ he wants to tell her. _I don’t get it, either. I’m sorry._

After dinner, he drives into town. He makes an excuse about needing to get stuff before his flight tomorrow— _broke my headphones on the way over, want to get a new pair_ —but really, he’s just trying to avoid a few more hours of suffocating tension. He takes the main road into town and finds the Food Lion he went to with Ed the day before, which seems to be the only place likely to have headphones. Not that he actually needs them, but he knows enough about covert ops to know that when you create a story, you follow through. 

He pulls out his phone in the glow of the lamps outside the store and checks to see if he’s got service. Miraculously, he does. There’s a text from Riza from four hours ago— _Let me know if you need a ride from the airport tomorrow. - R_ —but Roy realizes, looking at his phone, that it’s not her he wants to talk to right now. He opens his contacts, scrolls through, and dials as he walks through the automatic doors of the supermarket into the chilled atrium. 

It rings four times before Hughes picks up. “Hello?” 

“Hey,” Roy says. “You busy?” He can hear Elicia wailing in the background. How old is she now—four? Five? He can’t keep track. 

“Kinda,” Hughes says. “What’s up? You _called_ me. You didn’t text. So I’m assuming it’s an emergency.” 

“Not exactly,” Roy says. He wanders through the produce section, watching mist sift down over lumpy mounds of broccoli. “It’s—I’m at my dad’s funeral. Well, the funeral was yesterday.” 

“Shit,” Hughes says. “Elicia, baby, daddy’s on the phone. No, Jesus, Roy, I’m sorry.” 

“No,” Roy says, “it’s fine. We weren’t close.” He moves past a stacked display of seltzer towards the back of the supermarket. “I’m in kind of a weird situation here, Hughes.”

“Elaborate on ‘weird,’ please.” 

“I’m—” Roy doesn’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t sound as bizarre as it feels. “You remember my half brothers. My dad’s kids with his second girlfriend.” 

“The same ones who got in that car wreck?” Hughes was the only person Roy really talked to about that when it happened. “Sure. How are they doing?” 

Roy doesn’t know how to answer that question. “I don’t know. They’re okay, I guess.” He stops in front of an end cap of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, staring into space. “He appointed me to be their guardian in the will.” 

There’s silence on the other end of the line for a minute. “Fuck,” Hughes says. 

“Yeah.” 

“So—no, come on, sweetie, just one bite—sorry. They can find someone else, right? You don’t have to do it?”

“What,” Roy asks, “you don’t think I’m a fit guardian?” He’s a little more stung by that than he would have expected. 

“Well—” There’s a brief, treacherous silence before Hughes goes on. “No, I’m not saying that, of course you’re fit. I’m just—I mean, do you _want_ to do it?” 

Roy turns the corner into an aisle stocked with notebooks and graph paper. “I don’t know,” he admits, scanning the shelves for headphones. “I mean, I don’t really _know_ them.”

“And you live in a different state,” Hughes points out. “And you don’t want kids.” 

“And one of them already hates me,” Roy sighs. He picks up a pack of lightbulbs, studies the wattage, and puts them back down. “Besides, they’ve already got someone they’re staying with. A family friend, she’s been raising them for years now. So it doesn’t make any sense.” 

“But,” Hughes says. He doesn’t go on. Roy can hear Elicia babbling near the phone. 

“But what?” he asks. 

“There’s a _but_ ,” Hughes says. “I can tell. So what is it?” 

“Oh,” Roy says. He thinks about that. He thinks about his apartment back in Missouri, with its marble countertops and recessed lighting and that painting Riza bought last fall. About his career, a long list of commendations and superlatives with a promising future ahead. He’s been told, unofficially of course, to expect a promotion some time in the next twelve months. He thinks about growing up with Chris, content with her as the firm foundation of his world but always wondering what was up with his dad that he disappeared and never came back. Wondering what was up with him, that his dad left. He thinks about standing in what must have been this same Food Lion seven years ago, buying tissues to bring to the wake of a woman he’d never met, to try to do some small, stupid thing for a couple of kids with whose life his life had so briefly and strangely collided. 

“I don’t know,” he tells Hughes. “I think I might not be very happy.”

“Oh, man.” Hughes’s voice on the other end of the line is soft. 

“Shut up,” Roy tells him. He doesn’t know why he said that. “That’s not—I mean, the fact is, look, I’ve got a lot of money. I get a damn good salary and I’m only spending it on myself, and these kids—” He doesn’t know how much it costs annually to maintain two prosthetics and a power wheelchair, let alone paying for doctors’ bills, prescriptions, assistive devices. “It’s got to be tens of thousands,” he tells Hughes. “Hell, it’s got to be _hundreds_ of thousands, easy. It doesn’t make sense for me _not_ to help out.” 

“You may be right,” Hughes says. “So, what—you’d put in for a transfer? Or would they come to live with you?” 

“I don’t know,” Roy says. He kind of can’t believe he’s actually discussing this—actually _considering_ this. “I might not have to. I mean, if we went through with it. From what that lawyer said, it sounds like the main responsibility is financial. Residency doesn’t matter so much, as long as I make sure they _have_ a place to live.” 

“I’ll be damned,” Hughes says. “You’re really thinking about it, aren’t you?” 

“I don’t know,” Roy says. He’s annoyed. “Maybe.” 

Hughes is laughing. Roy can hear him making a perfunctory effort to stifle it, but it’s coming through loud and clear all the same. “Good for you,” he says finally. “Good for you. Listen, for what it’s worth, I think you’re more than fit.” 

“Thanks,” Roy says. He sighs. “Ed disagrees.” 

“So talk to him,” Hughes says simply. “Kids are just people. Talk to them, see what they’re thinking. Don’t just guess what they need, ask them. You’ll figure it out.” 

Roy doesn’t quite share his confidence, but he appreciates the sentiment. “Thanks. I should go,” he adds. He can’t find any headphones, and he’s been up and down this aisle eight times now. He’s ready to call it a lost cause. “My flight’s in seven hours.” 

“Go ahead,” Hughes says. “Come on, Elicia, say bye to Uncle Roy.” 

“ _Bye, Uncle Roy!_ ” 

“Bye, Elicia.” 

“You’ll figure it out,” Hughes says again. “Call me if you need anything. Better yet, text me. Like a normal person.” 

Roy doesn’t want to go back empty-handed, so he buys a pack of gum and a Red Bull for the morning and pauses in the car to reply to Riza’s text before heading back up the dark, wandering roads to the house. 

The house is mostly dark when he gets in, but the porch light’s on and he can tell from the glow at the back of the house that Pinako’s at work in the garage. He slips in through the front door and heads to the kitchen for a glass of water before he heads upstairs. As he’s getting the glass out of the cabinet, though, he hears footsteps on the stairs, and when he turns around, Ed’s in the doorway. 

“Hey,” Ed says. He’s leaning against the doorframe in just his boxers and a huge t-shirt, his left arm crossed over his stomach. He’s taken the prosthetic off for the night, Roy notices, leaving his right sleeve hanging loose. He’s never seen Ed without it before. 

“Hey yourself,” he says, setting the glass down. 

“You know, I can’t believe you,” Ed says. He’s staring at Roy’s face, like he’s looking for something. “You’re seriously just gonna leave without talking to us.” 

Roy can’t figure this kid out. He spent the whole evening glaring daggers at Roy whenever Roy so much as looked his way, and now he’s mad at _Roy_ for not trying to talk things over? “I wasn’t aware you wanted to talk to me,” he says. “I thought we’d revisit the matter when we follow up with the lawyer.” _When I’m seven hundred miles away and you can’t try to punch me,_ he thinks, but doesn’t say. 

“‘ _Revisit the matter_.’” Ed echoes sarcastically. “Jesus. You really don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” 

“I don’t think I ever claimed to,” Roy points out. 

“Oh, save it,” Ed says. “I don’t need the fake humble act. Just admit you’re here because you thought you’d get some money.” 

“That’s not why I’m here.” 

“Okay,” Ed says. He moves into the kitchen and stands across from Roy, his left palm splayed flat on the counter, his cheeks turning red. He’s really angry, Roy realizes. “Then you’re here because it looks good. So you can pat yourself on the back, go back to Missouri and tell everyone about all the nice shit you did for your dad’s bastard kids. Al told me what you said this morning,” he says. “I get what you’re doing. I get what you think of us.” 

Roy shakes his head, not sure which part of that to respond to. “And what’s that? What am I doing, Ed?” He really wants to know. 

“You think you know us,” Ed says. “You think you’re gonna come in and fix everything.” He’s red in the face. “You don’t know _shit_.” 

“I know that.” 

“You offered Al _money_?” There’s enough outrage in Ed’s voice that it nearly cracks on that last word. “You don’t _know_ him. You don’t know us. And you think you’re just gonna come along every seven years and drop some cash on us like that’s worth anything? _Fuck_ you.”

Roy feels guilt tugging in his gut; Ed’s voicing the same things he’s said to himself, hoping they weren’t true. “That’s not what this is,” he says. He can hear the lack of conviction in his own voice. 

“Cut the crap,” Ed says. “You—for fuck’s sake, you never even _met_ our mom. And you—you come out here and plan her funeral? What kind of fucked up savior complex is that?” 

So that’s what this is about. This is a resentment planted a long time ago, springing up now with an intensity that seems to surprise Ed as much as it does Roy. This is half a lifetime of anger and grief, hitting Roy here in the Rockbells’ kitchen like a punch that’s seven years overdue. Roy notices, to his horror, that the kid’s got tears in his eyes. 

“That’s not why I came,” he says. “To look good. I just wanted to help. They called, and I wanted to help. That’s all.” 

“Bullshit.” Ed turns away from the counter and starts pacing; tight, stormy laps between the island and the refrigerator. “That’s bullshit and you know it.” 

Roy sighs and leans back against the sink. “Is that why you hate me?” he asks. “Because I came for your mother’s funeral?” He’s always wondered. He might as well ask now. 

Ed freezes midway between the fridge and counter, and stares at him. After several tense seconds, he starts laughing. “You’re fucking kidding me.” 

Roy doesn’t give in; he keeps his gaze level. “I’m not.” 

“You really wanna know?” Ed asks, his eyebrow jumping. His fist’s clenching and unclenching at his side. 

Roy shrugs. “I’m curious.” 

“Go fuck yourself,” Ed tells him. “That’s why.” He starts pacing again, clasping his hand at the back of his head. 

“Well,” Roy says, “thanks for that.” He turns to the sink and fills his glass; it’s nearly midnight now. He’ll have to leave for the airport in less than six hours, and this conversation is going nowhere. 

Ed sighs loudly behind him. “ _Fuck’s_ sake,” he says. “Are you gonna make me say it?” 

Roy turns. “Say what?” 

“You should do it,” Ed says. He’s looking Roy in the eye. “The old bastard was right. You know it and I know it. You should be our guardian,” he says, flatly. 

Roy considers himself pretty difficult to shock, but he’s got no idea what to make of this. Ed still looks like he wants to rip Roy’s guts out. “You want me to say yes?” 

“I didn’t say that, dumbass,” Ed says. He leans back against the fridge, glaring at Roy. “No, I fucking don’t. But you’ve got more money than Granny does. Enough money to pay for Al’s bills. Enough to send him to college, I bet.”

He’s right. Of course he’s right. “I do. You too, if you want.” 

“I don’t,” Ed says. He takes a deep breath. “But I’m not gonna take that away from Al just because I can’t fucking stand you. It wouldn’t be fair to him. Or to Granny, or Winry.” He shrugs. “So you should do it.” 

Roy doesn’t know how to respond. “We have to talk to Al first,” he says finally. 

Ed nods. “Yeah, we do. He’s not gonna like it either, but I think he agrees with me.” 

“Ms. Rockbell, too.” He can hear Pinako out in the garage, clattering around under the rumble of some ancient motor. “I’m not trying to force my way in here, Ed. I don’t want to cause problems for any of you.” 

“Whatever,” Ed says. He looks at the clock above the stove. “Don’t you have a flight tomorrow? You should go to bed,” he says. Like he’s the adult here, and Roy’s the stubborn kid. 

He’s right, though—Roy _does_ need to sleep. His plane’s taking off in six hours. “I’ll call you guys,” he says. “We’ll talk about it. We’ll figure it out.” 

“Great,” Ed says. “I can’t wait.” He’s visibly suppressing his desire to punch Roy. He turns to go, his footsteps uneven on the bare wood floor, but he stops in the doorway, his back still turned to Roy. “One more thing. I wanna go with you. To Maine.” 

“What?” 

“You heard me, asshole.” He doesn’t turn around. “I want to go see the cabin.” 

“I thought you said you didn’t want it.” 

“I don’t.” He shrugs. “I still wanna see it.” 

Roy’s exhausted. He’s done trying to keep up with whatever’s going on in Ed’s head. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll go together.” 

“Okay,” Ed says, and disappears, leaving Roy alone in the kitchen, watching moonlight stretch across the empty island like a spreading stain. 


	2. the trip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Ed throws up several times in this chapter; it's not graphic but it happens. There's also discussion of cancer, chemotherapy, and remission.

Roy expects Ed to change his mind. About everything, possibly, but the cabin in particular. What’s the point? The lawyer sends over the inspection report the week Roy flies back to Missouri, and it’s a nightmare: the boiler’s on its last legs, the carpet’s packed with mildew, and there’s a mysterious hole, apparently, in the kitchen ceiling. Calling it a fixer would be generous; there’s no way they’re getting any decent money on it. But when Roy calls to check in, to give them the update and ask how they’re feeling about everything, Ed’s insistent. He’s going to Maine with Roy. 

They don’t really talk about the issue of guardianship. When Roy tries to bring it up, Ed just says they’ll talk about that later. Roy can’t tell if he’s back to being opposed to the whole thing, or if he’s just being weird about it. He doesn’t venture to ask. 

Ed refuses outright to let Roy buy him a plane ticket, and there’s a slim but reasonable chance there’ll be salvageable stuff at the cabin worth bringing back, so in the end it’s decided that Roy and Ed will drive up together and drive back. So, three weeks after the funeral, Roy flies back out to Rizembul with everything still up in the air. At the Hertz down the highway from the little regional airport, he rents a van, a clunky soccer-mom looking Honda Odyssey with a rearview camera and three zones of air conditioning that starts by pushing a button instead of an ignition key. He has no idea how much space they’ll need, but he figures they’ll make it work one way or another. On the way to Rizembul, as the van carries him smoothly over the looping sweeps of increasingly bleak and crumbling highway, he tries to picture the little cabin up in Maine. Every image that comes to mind feels like it’s straight out of a movie, some set piece constructed for a different story. He’s got no idea what to expect. 

Al’s waiting outside when he pulls up the winding driveway, sitting on the porch in cutoff shorts and a Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirt: it’s getting hot, the kind of sudden spring heat that takes you by surprise and leaves you gasping. It hits Roy in the face, muggy and thick, when he steps out of the three-zone A/C. 

“Hi,” Al says. His right hand’s twitching, tapping lightly against the armrest of his wheelchair. Roy doesn’t know if it’s a nervous tic or a coincidence. Al raises his eyebrows at the van. “Cool ride.” 

“Thanks,” Roy says. 

There’s a spurt of clattering activity inside the front door, and Ed comes out with a backpack slung over his shoulder. He’s dressed as usual in black jeans and that giant red hoodie; unlike Al, he’s not making any concessions to the weather. As usual, he’s scowling. 

“Ready?” Roy asks, and Ed shrugs. 

“If you say so.” He turns to Al and smiles, all the annoyance dropping off his face. “Don’t worry, man,” he says, and Al _does_ look worried. There’s that line between his eyebrows again. 

“Be careful.” 

“I always am,” Ed protests.

“You’re not.” Al’s frowning at him. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

Ed rolls his eyes, but Roy can see the fondness in his face fighting with annoyance. “Okay. Promise. No stupid shit.”

Winry comes to the door, her hair pulled up in a sloppy bun, grease-stained coveralls tied at her waist. She leans against the doorpost, arms crossed, a stern look on her face. “Take care of yourself,” she says. “Don’t do anything dumb.” 

“Why’s everyone keep saying that?” Ed demands. 

“Do you really want me to answer that?” Winry shoots back. She grins. “Call us when you get there.” 

“Whatever,” Ed says, turning back to Al. “You’re sure you’re gonna be okay with me gone this long?”

“I’m fine,” Al says patiently. “Granny and Winry are here. I’ll be fine.”

“Right,” Ed says, like he’s convincing himself. “Right.” He drops his backpack and leans down to hug Al. For a minute, they stay like that: Al leaning forward in his chair, his face pressed hard into Ed’s shoulder; Ed’s left arm shaking a little from the intensity of his grip. Roy hears Al whispering something; catches the word _Mom_. He feels like he’s intruding, so he walks back towards the van, inspecting the hub caps while the boys finish hugging. 

Eventually, Ed breaks away, a little pink and sheepish. He straightens up, grabbing the backpack off the porch and resuming his stubborn frown. “I’ll be back in a few days,” he says, nodding towards Winry, and turns towards the van, throwing a little wave over his shoulder. “Tell Granny I said bye.” 

Roy eyes him as he approaches the van, looking like he’s marching towards his execution. “You good?” 

“Shut up and drive.” Ed hauls the passenger door open, chucking his bag inside and settling himself in the seat. The whole way down the driveway, Roy can see his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, watching Al recede into the distance. It occurs to him that this must be the first time these two have been apart for more than a few hours. 

“Put your seatbelt on,” Roy reminds him as they reach the main road, and Ed rolls his eyes dramatically. 

“Okay, _dad_.” 

“Don’t.” They’re about to spend sixteen straight hours in this car together, and that’s before they get to the sorting-through-dead-dad’s-belongings part. Roy’s not sure he’s gonna make it. 

Once they get underway, it’s actually not so bad. The air inside the car is crisp and cold, with that sharp rental car smell. They wind up the county roads the way Roy came, taking every turn that leads them in the direction of a bigger road, a bigger town, a distant city. Eventually, the burnt hills and battered silos that line the highways turn into shopping centers and restaurants; Roy merges onto I-81 North, and they settle into a fixed channel between knobbly green hills, winding north and east towards Washington. 

Ed’s not a great passenger. From the moment they left Rizembul, he started getting antsy. The van’s audio system offered a fleeting opportunity for entertainment, but they don’t have a cord to hook up Roy’s phone to the speakers, and after about twenty minutes of flicking between channels Ed gets bored and leaves the dial tuned to a station that appears to play exclusively ads for local auto repair shops. After that, he just drums on the side of his door, a scattered series of insistent rhythms Roy can’t make any sense of.

“How much farther?” he asks abruptly after about an hour of silence—the longest time, by far, that Roy’s seen him keep his mouth shut. 

“A long way,” Roy tells him. “We’ll probably make it to Philadelphia tonight. New York, if we’re lucky.” 

“I thought we were going to Maine.” 

“There’s stuff between here and Maine,” Roy says drily. 

“I knew that.” Ed squints out his window at the passing hills. “When are we gonna stop? I gotta pee.” 

“Already?” 

“It’s been an _hour_.” Ed’s squirming in his seat, bouncing his legs, tapping out an urgent little beat on the window. “Isn’t there, like, a gas station or something?” 

There isn’t. There’s nothing but hills. “You’re sure you can’t wait?” 

Ed glares. “I’m not five.” But Roy detects a slightly panicked look underneath the sarcasm, so Roy hits the gas a little harder and starts scanning for rest stops. 

In the end, they stop at an Exxon just off the highway, and Roy takes the opportunity to top up the gas while Ed hurries in to get the bathroom key. There’s a dark shade gathering over the afternoon, odd gray waves cresting in the sky over the distant treeline. Roy watches the sky squirm as he pumps the gas, and hopes they’ll somehow manage to skirt around the storm. 

As they’re pulling out, Roy notices a McDonald’s off to the right, set a little further in from the central vein of 81. He glances at the clock; it’s past noon now. “You hungry?” He can’t really remember the last time he had a Big Mac, but he figures it’s about as good as they’re gonna get out here. 

To his surprise, Ed shakes his head. “Not really.” 

They skip McDonald’s and get back on the highway, heading north. Again, Ed won’t sit still: he starts fiddling with everything in reach, leaning back in his seat, telling Roy about some book he read about ant societies. 

“You got your ant colony, right, and let’s say the ants come across some kind of river. A stream, whatever, it’s too big for one ant to cross—so they build a bridge, right, out of their own bodies. And that means some of the ants get across, just not all of them. The bridge ants sacrifice themselves for the good of their kin.” He’s playing with the sun visor as he talks, snapping it back and forth. “See, altruism ought to be a problem, right, an evolutionary disadvantage. But it’s not. This guy figured it out. It’s not _additive_ , it’s something else. And so that’s where you get Hamilton’s rule. Genes increase in frequency when the genetic relation between the actor and the recipient times the benefit of the sacrifice are greater than the cost of the act. The cost of building the bridge.” He sighs, pushing the visor back into place and putting his boots up on the dashboard. “But kin selection doesn’t really account for human behavior, so that’s where you get into multilevel selection theory—” 

“This is a rental car,” Roy reminds him. 

Ed rolls his eyes, jerks his feet off the dashboard, and keeps going. Ants and evolution take them through the next big town, where Ed announces that he has to pee again, and they stop at a Burger King for lunch and a bathroom break. Back on the road, Roy watches the clouds thicken in front of them, dark and forbidding. They’re not going to miss this storm. 

Ed’s back to playing with the radio. This time, he’s found a rock station, and he keeps turning up the volume, laughing when Roy turns it back down, and then waiting till Roy’s not looking to spin the knob again so it’s blaring in their ears. 

“Cut it out,” Roy tells him after the fourth time. 

“Whatever,” Ed says. He’s bouncing his feet again, looking out the window. “Where’s the next stop?” 

“You _can’t_ have to go again.” Roy glances over at him; torn between annoyance, disbelief, and the faintest strain of worry. That’s three times in less than four hours. “It’s been, like, fifteen minutes.” 

Ed shrugs. “Maybe I do.” 

“Do you have some kind of medical condition I don’t know about?”

Ed ignores the question and rolls down his window, which sends a blast of damp air whipping furiously through the car. “Shut it,” Roy demands, and Ed reluctantly presses the button again. 

“This is _boring_.” 

“I’m sorry,” Roy tells him. He is not sorry. “Take a nap.” 

Ed shakes his head. He’s rocking back and forth slightly in his seat. Roy is going to lose his mind if he has to endure twelve more hours of this. 

Ten minutes later, they hit the storm. Or, rather, the storm hits them: in the space of about a minute, what starts as a lazy percussion on the roof of the van turns into a white fog of water, enveloping them completely, obscuring the cars ahead. They’re trapped in a moving sea, speeding down the highway with close to zero visibility, and thunder roars overhead as the car plunges on. 

It’s dramatic as hell, but Roy’s driven in rain like this before, so he’s not all that worried. It’s pretty simple: take it slow, stay focused, leave more space than you think you need, go gentle on the brakes and be ready to act fast if things take a turn. He’s grateful, though, that for the first time in several hours Ed’s gone quiet. It helps with the staying focused thing. 

Or it does, until he hears an odd noise from the passenger seat and breaks his focus for a split second to glance over at Ed. The kid’s bracing himself against the door, gripping the armrest with a desperation that shows in his white knuckles, breathing hard and fast. He’s staring out the windshield, but his eyes are unfocused. 

“You good?” Roy asks. Eyes back on the road. Focus. Drive. Stay on the road. 

“I don’t—” Ed’s voice is choked. “I don’t feel good.” 

Fuck. “Okay, I’m—just hang on, I can’t pull over here, I’m just gonna get us to the next exit.” If Ed pukes in the rental car, Roy’s gonna murder him. 

He can hear Ed breathing, too fast and too shaky and too loud. “We’re gonna crash,” he says, his voice amplified in the suddenly hot, close space. 

_Oh_. Roy’s putting a couple things together suddenly. “No,” he says firmly, “we’re not.” 

“We’re gonna crash,” Ed says again, with more insistence. Roy can hear panic climbing in his voice. The rain’s still a fucking waterfall on the car, shaking the body of the van with its weight, and he can feel Ed tensing beside him like he’s gonna fucking snap in two, and he just needs to get them to an exit, but he can’t even see the signs. 

“We’re gonna be fine,” he tells Ed. “Just—breathe. I’ve done this before.”

“Fucking—me _too_ ,” Ed hisses. “Jesus fucking _Christ_.” 

It’s probably only a minute or so later that Roy sees, through the curtains of pale water lit up by their headlights, a small green square that reads _EXIT_. It feels like a lot longer than that. “We’re getting off here,” he tells Ed, whose breathing has picked up a slight sob on the end of each exhale, and eases the car onto the off-ramp. 

They pull into an empty parking lot outside a lonely white church, rain still beating down on the car. Ed’s got his door open almost before Roy puts the van in park; he tumbles out of the car immediately, staggering a few paces away to sink into a squat, gripping his head with his left hand. Roy watches from the car, worried: he’s not sure if Ed’s throwing up, or just panicking. Either way, the car seat’s getting soaked, so Roy reaches across the console to pull the door closed. 

He gives Ed a minute to recover, watching him through the still-burning headlights. He feels stupid for not thinking of this before it happened; of course the kid’s got baggage here. Roy knows guys who lost legs and arms overseas who can’t walk out the door in the morning. He was an idiot not to see something like this coming. Or maybe Ed was the idiot for not mentioning it was a possibility. Roy isn’t sure. Probably both of them, he thinks. 

When Ed doesn’t move after ten minutes, Roy reluctantly grabs the umbrella from the back seat and steps outside, feeling the weight of the rain land on him with a righteous fury. He approaches slowly, like Ed’s a wounded animal. 

“You okay?” 

Ed doesn’t answer. He’s still crouched where he first stopped, holding his head with one hand and his stomach with the other; he doesn’t look up at Roy. 

“You’re getting wet.” It’s an understatement; Ed’s soaked. His sweatshirt is dark with rain, a sodden burgundy. Even with the umbrella, Roy can feel his own clothes getting wet. Another five minutes out here, and he’ll be soggy, and the irritation of that fact is warring with his sympathy. “Come on. At least get back in the car.” 

Ed shakes his head. “I just need a _minute_ , man,” he spits.

“You’ve been out here for ten minutes.” 

Ed scrubs his hand over his face. “Then I need eleven minutes.” 

Roy isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. They’re hours out, probably a fourth of the way to this stupid cabin, in the middle of nowhere. If he takes Ed back, that’s an extra eight hours on top of the thirty-two he was already preparing to drive this week. Besides, while he can’t deny that he’d appreciate the quiet, he has to admit that, when it comes down to it, he’d rather not do this alone. 

But Ed might not be able to make it. They’ve got at least four more hours to do today, and then eight more tomorrow, and Roy can’t guarantee they won’t hit more bad weather. 

He’s puzzling over this dilemma when Ed pushes himself up off the ground abruptly and spins on his heel, stomping back through the flooded parking lot to the car without a word. Roy follows, pausing at the door in a futile attempt to shake the worst of the rain off the umbrella before he chucks it into the back seat. When he gets in, Ed’s draped over the back of the passenger seat, digging furiously in his backpack for something. He finds it and drops back into the seat with a shaky sigh of satisfaction. 

“This is a _rental_ car,” Roy says. Ed’s got a lighter and a joint, which he’s trying to light with a dangerously shaking hand. 

“Bite me,” Ed mumbles. The flame’s waving perilously in front of his face; he’s frowning with concentration. 

“You’re gonna burn yourself,” Roy comments.

“No, I’m not.” 

Roy sighs. He reaches over and takes the joint and lighter, which earns a yelp of protest from Ed. Roy ignores him and lights the joint, cranking the A/C up a little to compensate for the smoke. He holds it back out to Ed. “Here. You get the smell into the vents, you’re paying the cleaning fees.” 

Ed takes it cautiously. “Thanks.” He shuts his eyes, leaning back against the headrest as he inhales. He’s still in his sodden hoodie, starting to shiver as the blast of cold air conditioning hits him. 

For a while, they sit in silence while Ed smokes and Roy watches the rain sluicing over the windshield, thinking about the miles they’re missing, the distance still to cover before night falls. The center of the storm’s passed over; it’s not an apocalyptic racket on the roof anymore, just a gentle patter undercut by an uneven little clicking sound. The thunder’s an afterthought somewhere to the west. The roads ought to be fine by now, Roy thinks. It’s just a question of which direction they’re driving next. 

“You good to keep going?” he asked Ed. Ed’s staring out the window, face turned away from Roy. Roy can’t read the expression in his distorted reflection. “Was that—are you okay?” 

Ed shrugs. His knee’s jiggling; Roy isn’t sure it’s voluntary this time. “It’s fine,” he mumbles. 

It can’t be just a car thing, because Ed was fine back in Rizembul; he was fine for the first four hours. “Has that happened before?” Roy asks. 

“It used to.” Ed’s rubbing his eyes, his back still turned towards Roy. “Back—the first year after it happened, I couldn’t get in a car without puking. It was like some kind of alarm system, like my body was trying to get me to get out.” He laughs. “Getting to school was a bitch.” 

Roy can imagine. “And what happened?” 

Ed shrugs. “I took a lot of Dramamine,” he says. “And I got used to it.” 

“I’m sorry.” Roy doesn’t know what to say. He’s out of his depth here. “You should have been able to get some kind of counseling,” he offers lamely.

Ed snorts. “Dude. I saw my mom die when I was eight years old. Of course they sent me to fucking counseling.” He drags a hand through his dripping hair, shaking it out against the dashboard. Roy realizes that the clicking isn’t the rain; it’s Ed’s teeth.

“Listen,” he says. “We don’t have to do this. I mean, you don’t have to do this. I can take you back, I’ll go up there by myself.” 

Ed shakes his head. “I told Al I’d go. I told him I’d—” He breaks off. 

“You told him you’d what?” 

“It’s stupid.” 

“Maybe not.” 

Ed sighs. “I told him I’d bring back anything of Mom’s. Any—I don’t know, pictures, letters, stuff like that.” 

“That’s not stupid. She was your mother.” 

“I know that, asshole.” Ed turns to glare at him. “Listen, just—get driving. I’m fine. Forget about it.” 

“You should change your clothes first. You’re soaked. At least take off that sweatshirt.” 

Ed shakes his head. “I’m _fine_.” 

“You’re shivering,” Roy points out. 

“I’m not taking off my clothes here, pervert,” Ed says, wrapping his arms around himself. “Or what, you’re worried about the seats, right? Your precious rental seats?” 

“I’m worried about _you_ ,” Roy says, a little louder than he intended. He didn’t mean it to come out quite that frank. He’s annoyed with himself. 

Ed looks as annoyed as Roy feels. “Well, don’t be.” He holds the joint in his mouth for a moment while he leans forward to squeeze the rain out of his braid, letting the water drip into the footwell. “I’m fine.” 

Roy isn’t sure what the responsible decision is here. Ed’s clearly not fine, and Roy’s not a therapist, and it feels like going on as if nothing happened is asking for trouble. A few weeks ago, he’d have said it wasn’t really his problem—if Ed says he’s fine, well, that’s his business, he’s fine. But a few weeks ago, Roy wasn’t getting ready to sign paperwork making Ed and his well-being legally his business. 

“You’re sure?” he says. It’s not the right thing. Ed doesn’t even bother answering. He’s staring out the window again, blowing smoke towards the foggy glass. Roy looks at the clock; they’ve already been stopped here for forty-five minutes. 

“Tell me if you need to stop again,” he says finally, and starts the car. 

The rain’s a soft cloud around them as they pull back onto the freeway. Ed finishes his joint, rolls down the window a crack to flick the burnt end out into the rain, and then curls up in the seat, hugging his knees up to his chest. Roy doesn’t mention his muddy boots on the dashboard this time. They’ll clean the car up before they take it back. 

About twenty miles down the road, Ed starts to snore. Roy thinks it might be the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Ed sleeps the rest of the way to Washington, where Roy skirts around the city on 495 and heads up towards Baltimore. Ed wakes up while they’re coming out of the last of the glut of traffic around the capital, and stretches, yawning and blinking around at the city lights. 

“Where the fuck are we?” 

“Just north of D.C.,” Roy tells him. “Couple hours to Philadelphia, and we’ll call it a day. Okay?” 

Ed shrugs, rubbing his neck and wincing. “Whatever.” He yawns again and pokes at the radio dial. “Can we stop soon?” 

They stop at a gas station south of Baltimore as the sun sinks over the horizon. Ed goes to change out of his still-damp clothes in the bathroom out back while Roy pumps gas and stretches his cramped neck and legs. Ed says he’s not hungry, and they’ve already lost time today, so Roy buys some pretzels and sodas and a big bag of gummy worms, and decides that’ll have to work for dinner. As they’re getting back in the van, he sees Ed pause for a moment, leaning his forehead against the window, his mouth moving silently. 

“You good?” he asks. 

“Fuck you,” Ed says, and climbs in. 

“Eat something,” Roy says. “I’m supposed to be looking out for you. I don’t want to get Al mad at me.” 

Ed finds a classic rock station on the radio, and for a while they eat pretzels and listen in silence as Baltimore slides past, a hazy cloud of lights out the right-hand window. The station crackles out of existence an hour later as they cross state lines, and Ed fiddles with the dial some more until he finds a station playing Taylor Swift (“this is probably your favorite, right?”) and then another that seems to be just two old men talking about the blessed sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, which Ed insists on listening to for a few minutes just so that he can roll his eyes. 

“What kind of sacrifice is that,” he says through a mouthful of pretzels. “Some delusional guy gets executed by the imperial government. That’s not a sacrifice, that’s just dumb.” Roy can tell he’s still thinking about the ants. 

He finds a station playing classical music, and they listen to Beethoven as they cut through Delaware and follow 1-95 north towards Philadelphia. As they merge into increasingly thicker traffic, he can feel Ed getting antsy in the passenger seat again. 

“You good?” he asks. 

Ed flinches as a Volvo barrels past them, doing twenty past the speed limit. “I’m fine.” 

Roy doubts it. “Remind me the name of that book you were talking about earlier,” he says. “The one with the ants.” 

“ _Evolution and Ethics_ ,” Ed says, bracing himself against the car door with his prosthetic arm. “It’s one of the books Dad left when he—you know. Left.” He flips the air conditioning vent back and forth, a steady _click-click-click_. “I’ve been reading through them. He was a dick, but some of them are cool.” 

“Like what?” Roy didn’t realize Hohenheim left anything behind when he left Rizembul. He’d sort of assumed it was the same as it was with him and Chris: there one day, gone the next, nothing to show for it. 

“Oh, you know.” Ed drums on the dashboard. “Lots of philosophy. Science stuff. I don’t know.” He’s breathing faster. 

“Hey,” Roy says. “Focus. Explain it to me again.” 

Ed takes a deep breath, sighs heavily, and does. Roy hears his voice even out as they work their way through the golden tangle of highways and suburbs snarled around Philadelphia. 

They stop for the night at a Hampton Inn off the turnpike, just outside New York. They’re a little short of the halfway point, but they lost time today. They’ll make it up tomorrow, Roy tells himself. Ed stumbles into the room and rolls right onto the closest bed, stretching out like a grateful starfish, and Roy isn’t far behind. 

When he wakes up the next morning, Ed’s not in the room. Roy responds in what he feels is the natural way—he panics—but in the end it turns out he hasn’t actually lost the kid he’s supposed to be responsible for in an unfamiliar city. Ed’s outside, sitting cross-legged on the curb by the van and smoking, his hood pulled up to block the brilliant morning sun. 

“Hey,” Roy says. Ed squints up at him. 

“Hey.”

“Everything okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Ed asks. He leans back, blowing a stream of smoke into the air. Roy can hear birds in the trees at the edge of the parking lot and the roar of traffic on the turnpike. “This hotel’s pretty cool,” Ed says. “There’s a machine down the hall with just, like, free ice.” 

“That’s an ice machine,” Roy says.

“That’s what I said,” Ed says. He scratches his nose. “Pretty cool.” 

“I’m going to shower,” Roy says. “Then we ought to get on the road. Have some breakfast. They should have something in the lobby.” 

They set out half an hour later with a bundle of muffins and donuts Ed brought from the breakfast buffet, wrapped in an unfolded napkin. Roy finds a Starbucks on the way to the turnpike and orders the biggest Americano he can, and a black coffee for Ed, who takes one look at the menu and just says “for Christ’s sake.” All in all, Roy thinks, they’re off to a decent start. 

The second day is easier, at least at first. Roy has to admit that getting high is probably a good strategy: Ed’s a lot calmer all morning than he was at any point yesterday, chattering away with his mouth full of donut, staring bug-eyed out the window when they’re stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge, headbanging along to the radio as they roll through Connecticut. He falls asleep around New Haven, passed out with his face pressed against the window, and snores until they’re nearing Boston. 

The afternoon sucks. Ed throws up twice, once when he wakes up outside Boston, caught in a sudden panic that forces Roy to pull over to the shoulder and let Ed out to puke on the side of the highway, hugging himself and cursing at Roy when he tries to check in. The second time is an hour down the road in New Hampshire; Ed’s spent the last sixty miles quiet and tense and tapping his fingers incessantly on every available surface, and as a Dodge cuts in front of them to let a semi pass by on the turnpike, he raps on the dashboard and says, “We gotta stop.” 

“Now?” Roy asks, and Ed nods hard. He’s clenching his jaw. They’re coming up to an exit, so Roy takes the off-ramp and pulls into a Sunoco station, where Ed disappears into the bathroom for a long time. 

“Listen,” Roy says when he comes back, distinctly pale and looking a little dizzy, “if you need to stop for the day, that’s fine. We can find a hotel. I’ll call the guy in North Yarmouth and tell him we’re running behind schedule.” 

“Shut up,” Ed says. He’s pacing next to the van with a water bottle, rinsing his mouth out and spitting into the grass at the edge of the parking lot. “I don’t need to stop. I need _you_ to stop saying stupid shit.” 

“I wasn’t kidding about the cleaning fee,” Roy warns him. “You puke in the car, I’ll make you pay it.” 

“I’m fine.” 

“If you say so.” 

“I mean—” Ed stops pacing for a minute and looks Roy in the eye; his whole body’s rigid. “Have you _seen_ someone snapped in half? Right in the middle.” He breaks off for a minute, breathing hard, then goes on: “Her head was _almost_ off. Almost. She could still—” 

He doesn’t finish the sentence. 

“I’m sorry,” Roy says. He’s acutely aware that anything he says right now is the wrong thing. 

“Shut up,” Ed snaps. “No, fuck you, shut up. Shut _up_. It’s just fucking physics. It’s—Newton’s law.” He sits down on the parking block, head on his knees. “It’s just mass times acceleration. You can’t do anything about that.” Roy’s not sure whether Ed’s talking to him, or to himself. 

“Al doesn’t remember it,” Ed says. His head’s still down on his knees. “I mean, nothing. He says he remembers getting in the car, and he remembers waking up in the hospital. That’s it.” He sits up, staring off across the parking lot, his eyes unfocused. “I dunno why I have to remember it all.” 

Roy feels sick himself. He doesn’t say anything. 

“I’m gonna throw up again,” Ed says. He sounds tired. He rolls up onto his feet and stumbles over to the patch of grass at the edge of the parking lot. Roy hears him dry heaving, his flesh hand braced against the fence. After a minute, he picks up the water bottle Ed was drinking from and brings it over. Ed takes it with a badly shaking hand, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. 

“I can see if they’ve got Dramamine in there,” Roy offers. It’s not tender, but it’s constructive. They’ve got a little over an hour to go. 

“Whatever,” Ed says. “It’s not—yeah. Fine.” 

“Okay,” Roy says. “I’ll go get some.” He hesitates for a moment before suggesting, “Do you want to call Al?” 

Ed freezes. “No,” he says finally. “No. Listen—” He takes a shuddering breath, screwing up his eyes and scrubbing at his hair. “Don’t tell him about this. Okay? I don’t want him to worry.” 

Too late for that, Roy thinks. Al’s going to worry until Ed’s back in Rizembul. He’s pretty sure these two haven’t gone a day since 2008 not worrying about each other. “What about Winry?” 

Ed, who’s been a weird shade of off-white ever since he stepped out of the bathroom, turns the color of a tomato. “If you call her, I’ll kill you.” He sounds like he genuinely means it. 

Roy drops it, leaves Ed outside and goes into the convenience store, where he hunts through the aisles and finds the little collection of over-the-counter drugs near the front, overpriced handfuls of pills in little travel-sized packets. He grabs a pack of Dramamine, and some Advil and Pepto-Bismol for good measure, then heads to the fridges at the back for ginger ale. 

This must be what having a kid is like, he thinks as he scans the rows of bottles for the brand Chris used to buy when he felt crappy. They get sick, and it’s up to you to figure it out. Shit happens, and you find a way to keep them moving forward. He can hear Hughes’s voice in his head: _Kids are just people, Roy._

When he comes back out, Ed’s sitting on the parking block again, his head in his hands. Roy calls out a heads up before tossing over the Dramamine and the bottle of ginger ale. Ed catches the first and not the second, which lands on the pavement, the contents foaming silently inside the green plastic. 

“Great job, dumbass,” Ed says. “Did you play baseball in college or something?” 

“I got two,” Roy says, handing over the bag with the rest of the stuff. Ed picks through it sluggishly. 

“You really think I don’t have ibuprofen,” he comments, tossing the little box back into the bag. “I’ve got two prosthetics that should’ve been refitted a year ago and you think I don’t carry ibuprofen with me.” 

“Well,” Roy says, “now you’ve got extra.” He leans against the van, stretching his legs out. “Take something, and we’ll get going when you’re ready.” 

Ed doesn’t argue, for once. He chases the Dramamine down with the unrattled bottle of ginger ale and rests his elbows on his knees again, clasping his hands under his chin. Roy wants to ask about what he just said—about the prosthetics needing refitting—but he knows this isn’t the time, so he stows that information away. Something revisit later, after—well. He’s getting ahead of himself. They haven’t made any final decisions yet. 

“What do you think it’s gonna be like?” Ed asks, interrupting Roy’s train of thought. 

“What?” 

Ed shrugs. “You know. Dad’s place.” 

“Oh.” With everything else going on here, Roy had almost forgotten to worry about that part. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. 

“Me either,” Ed says softly. He snorts and takes another swig of ginger ale. “Knowing him, it’ll be a big fat fucking disappointment.” 

“Probably,” Roy agrees, and sees Ed smile. 

After about fifteen minutes, Ed starts yawning, and Roy makes the executive decision that it’s time to get back on the road. The sun’s starting to set, and if they get going now they just might make it to their destination before the light dies fully. Ed makes a pillow out of his red hoodie and props himself against the passenger-side door, the bottle of ginger ale resting against his stomach. Roy fiddles with the radio dial until they hit a soft rock station, and hears Ed mumble, “Oh, Christ, _please_.” 

He smiles. This is okay. He can live with this. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


They reach the cabin as the sun’s setting, a ridge of white fire over the tops of the trees. Roy pulls into the wide gravel driveway and steps out, feeling the slight bite of oncoming night. It’s not summer yet up here. He walks up to the house, looking around, trying and failing to imagine his father here.

It’s nothing like any of the things he pictured on the drive to Rizembul two days ago. There are no rustic logs, no dark-green trim, no cute pitched A-frame roof. It’s a drab gray building with chipped clapboard siding and a blue tin roof that’s as much rust as it is paint, too small for the clearing it’s set off in, as if someone planned to build a much bigger house on this spot and gave up. He tries the flimsy steel door; it’s locked, but from the looks of it, if the neighbor who’s supposed to come around with the key doesn’t show up, Roy could probably kick it down without much effort. 

Ed wakes up, rolls out of the van, and comes to stand beside him, still pulling on his sweatshirt. He tugs his hood up and wraps his arms around himself, yawning as he surveys the ugly shack. “Gross,” is his only comment. 

Roy agrees. “We don’t have to stay here tonight,” he says. “We can try to find a hotel.” 

Ed shrugs. His eyes are glassy. “Whatever.” He pulls a joint out of his pocket, lights it, and settles himself on the cracked concrete stoop. 

The guy with the key shows up about fifteen minutes later in a battered Tacoma with New Hampshire plates. He hands over a set of keys on a Homer Simpson keyring and nods at the house. “You knew the old man?” 

“He was my dad,” Roy says. The guy’s eyebrows shoot up. 

“Didn’t realize he had kids,” he says. “Kinda kept to himself.” 

“Yeah,” Roy says, “he was like that.” 

Inside, they’re met with melting shadows and sticky carpet and three rooms of books. It starts near the door with a towering stack of _National Geographic_ magazines that date back to 1983, and continues into the living space: piles of books ranged on the grubby living room carpet and crammed into two heavy bookcases; tennis equipment and old records stockpiled next to the fireplace in the far brick wall. The kitchen—barely more than a sink and a mini fridge in the corner nearest to the door—looks relatively clean, although Roy notices there are cobwebs stretched across the sink. There’s a card table in the middle of the room, piled so high with books that they can see the spindly metal legs bending slightly under the accumulated weight. 

“Jesus,” Ed says, breaking the silence. “You think he liked to read?” He picks up a book off the nearest tower, which happens to be on top of the TV, and flips through aimlessly. 

Roy takes a look at the ominous hole in the kitchen ceiling; it looks like water damage. He peeks into the dark bathroom, which smells overwhelmingly of mildew, and finds more books, plus a crowd of mugs on the rim of the sink, each of them with a thick layer of mold painted on the bottom. The little bedroom next to the bathroom is a nearly impenetrable nest of books, piled so high in such tightly-ranged stacks that it’s hard for Roy to imagine it as anything approaching a functional library, let alone a functional bedroom. The folded-up futon pushed against the far wall doesn’t look like it’s seen much use. 

He goes back out to the living room, where Ed’s abandoned the books and is stretched out on his back on the moth-eaten couch, looking very small and very stoned. “You should have dinner,” Roy tells him. 

“Does it look to you like this guy had food?” Ed says, wrinkling his nose. He has a point. 

Roy gets out his phone, makes the pleasant discovery that he has service here, and finds a pizza place close enough to deliver. While they wait for the pizza, he starts walking around the room, trying to start a vague catalog of Hohenheim’s possessions, or at least a game plan for getting them all out of here. They’re gonna have to cart most of it out in the trash, he realizes. His back hurts just thinking about it. 

“It smells like feet in here,” Ed says from the couch. He’s got his phone out, texting Al and Winry. Roy watches him snap a picture of the mounds of books on one of the apps kids use: Snapchat? Instagram? 

They eat on the couch in the living room, which is the only place in the house that’s clear enough for two people to sit side by side. Roy gets the creepy feeling that they’re sitting on the spot where Hohenheim spent most of his last days. Ed seems to be thinking the same thing, or maybe he’s still feeling sick from earlier; he downs a handful of ibuprofen along with the second ginger ale. He only eats two pieces of pizza and leaves the rest for Roy, who is frankly happy to put away an amount of Domino’s he hasn’t eaten since college. Two days, nine hundred miles; he’s wiped. 

Night creeps over the cabin; it’s hard to tell from inside, because all the windows are blocked out by bookcases except for a little square peephole over the sink, which lets in a tiny stream of light that dries up as they’re finishing dinner. Roy takes the empty pizza box and folds it in two, cramming it in the nearly-empty garbage can outside. From the front step, he can hear crickets in the woods all around. The moon’s a cracked circle of light directly over the driveway, sending its reflection down to sparkle in the gritty pebbles. 

He takes the futon in the bedroom and lets Ed have the couch; it’s comfort vs. ghosts, and Roy has just enough superstition in him to prefer not sleeping in a place where someone died less than a month ago. The futon mattress is so thin it feels like he’s lying directly on the metal frame, but at least he’s not gonna get haunted in his sleep. 

Sleep is a generous word for what he does that night. It’s mainly hours of staring at the ceiling, his mind running in random, dogged loops over old mistakes and frustrations. He spends an hour stuck on a problem they’re working on back at the lab, running the same errors in his head until it physically starts to hurt. 

He sits up and flicks on the dusty bedside lamp, bending down to squint at the titles of the books nearest to the futon. It’s a heavy reading list. _Pragmatic Bioethics. Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death. The After-Death Experience: Physics of the Non-Physical._ It’s starting to look like Hohenheim was the only who saw this coming. Roy picks up a book called _Prospects for Immortality: A Sensible Search for Life After Death_ and flips through. He scans the table of contents, which runs from Chapter One, “A Bird’s-eye View,” through “The Subatomic Quantum World” and “Meet the Grim Reaper” to Appendix III: “The Saved Consciousness Hypothesis.” 

He puts the book down. If his dad’s consciousness is saved somewhere, he doesn’t want to know about it. 

It’s weird. Before all this, he didn’t hate his father. He wondered about him, sure, but he wasn’t angry; he wasn’t sad. Hohenheim was barely an absence—a question Roy almost never bothered to ask. But he’s questioning more the closer he gets to him, the more he thinks about the kind of guy who runs away from all his kids and tells them to take care of each other. The kind of guy, apparently, obsessed with the idea of living on after a death he never bothered warning anyone to expect. He’s starting to get now why Ed hates him so much. 

Out in the living room, he can hear soft movement; Ed’s not sleeping either. Roy goes out to check on him and finds both his prosthetics on the couch and Ed himself on the floor, sitting propped against the brick wall with his right leg stretched out in front of him and a book on his lap. 

“Can’t sleep either, huh?” Roy says. Ed shrugs. 

“Just pain,” is all he says. He looks exhausted.

Roy goes over to the sink, turns it on, and watches the water spit and bubble down the drain. He holds his hand under the stream until it cools down and opens the cupboard. Inside, there’s a row of books on human anatomy and a plastic mug from Maine Medical Center. Roy takes it down, blowing gently to brush off the dust. 

“What’s the book,” he asks as he turns back towards Ed, mug in hand. Ed turns it over in his hand to squint at the cover, as if he’s forgotten. 

“ _New Clothes for Old Souls_ ,” he says. “ _Worldwide Evidence for Reincarnation_.” 

“Jesus,” Roy says. “I found a bunch of books in the bedroom—life after death, immortality, that kind of thing. Guess he was really into it.” 

“Guess he didn’t read enough,” Ed says. Outside, a truck lumbers past on the main road. 

“I guess not.” Roy shakes his head and heads for the bedroom, pausing in the doorway. “Get some sleep.” 

Ed leans his head back against the bricks, wincing. His eyes are closed. “Probably not.” 

Roy doesn’t argue. Back in the musty cave of the bedroom, he lies on the futon, staring up into darkness and thinking in an endless spiral about nothing. 

  
  


* * *

In the morning, Roy drives down the road to a gas station, where he picks up a carton of jumbo trash bags; some rubber gloves, sponges, and a bottle of the most robust-looking cleaning spray he can find; a box of donuts and two large coffees. 

“Spring cleaning?” asks the man behind the counter. He’s got a blue birthmark on his cheek; from far off, it looks like a bruise, but when Roy’s up close, he can see that the edges are too distinct, the shade a little too light. The man scans each of Roy’s purchases and packs them into a plastic bag with the kind of care you use wrapping up a gift. 

“Yeah,” Roy says, fumbling with his wallet. “Something like that.” 

Back at the cabin, he finds Ed in the bedroom, sitting on the floor with his back against the futon, texting Al. He looks haggard; Roy’s not sure he slept at all. He looks up when Roy comes in and announces, “This guy was a fucking ghoul.” 

“I’ve noticed,” Roy says, holding out the coffee without cream in it to Ed, who takes it gratefully. “We should start from the front of the house,” Roy determines. “Work our way back. There’s donuts in the kitchen,” he adds, and Ed’s eyebrows shoot up. 

They start in the entryway. At first, Roy tries to work carefully, scanning the titles of the books he’s picking up to see if there’s anything worth keeping, but it’s all the same: spiritualism, reincarnation, life after death, with a few old pulp novels and a bunch of poetry in several different languages mixed in. Half the books are damaged, their pages ripped or mildewed or warped beyond recognition, ink sifting off the paper as he cracks them open to look inside. Before too long, he’s shoveling the books into garbage bags without looking at them at all, hauling each full bag out onto the lawn. The floor slowly emerges from underneath the mountains of paper, patchy with mold and streaked with cobwebs. 

The place needs to be gutted. The only way they’re making money on this is if they can find someone itching to flip a 400-square foot summer house. Roy’s seen enough HGTV. There’s probably a market. People in Boston who don’t like their kids. Wives in New York who can’t stand their husbands. 

Ed moves slower. Part of that, Roy suspects, is pain. He won’t say anything about it, but Roy can see the tightness in his body, the way he favors his left leg and holds his right arm a little closer to himself. He’s been popping ibuprofen all morning, but it doesn't seem to be doing much. But he’s also doing what Roy can’t, and taking his time with the books, reading all the titles and flipping through before he tosses them in the trash. He’s got a little pile growing on the kitchen counter of books to keep; every once in a while he pauses, pushing himself up from the floor to limp over and add another volume to the stack. 

“Al might want them,” he says, when Roy asks. 

They don’t talk much as they work. There’s a tension sitting on the air between them that’s somehow different from what they carried on the way up here. Roy has the sense, as they comb through the moldy, dust-choked library, that they’re looking for different things that neither of them can quite put into words. 

By afternoon, they’ve cleared out the entry hallway and the kitchenette, which, in addition to the anatomy books, yields two Isaac Asimov novels and a barely opened box of Apple Jacks cereal so stale that when Ed puts an experimental handful in his mouth he’s forced to spit them back out immediately. 

“You didn’t have to eat them,” Roy points out. 

“How else were we gonna find out if they were stale?” 

Roy taps the side of the box. “ _Monsters University_ ad might’ve been a clue.” 

Ed grabs the box and stares at it. “Jesus,” he says. “Did this guy not eat?” 

“Apparently not.” Roy turns to survey the living room, and feels the fear of God well up in him. He’s not ready to tackle it yet. 

They agree to leave the living room for later, and split up to clean out the bathroom and the bedroom. Roy, in an effort to be the responsible party, takes the bathroom; he figures that’s probably a legitimate biohazard, so it’d be pretty fucked up to make the kid clean it out. He tugs on the rubber gloves, arms himself with rags and bleach, and dives in. 

Hohenheim’s bathroom is one of the most disgusting things Roy’s ever seen. The mugs he saw yesterday—a row of deep petri dishes along the edge of the sink—are just the beginning. There’s a curtain of mold hanging draped across the wall above the shower; when he sprays the stall down with bleach and to give it at least a surface scrub, he finds that the drain is plugged with a wad of long, tangled hair, clotted with something greenish-black and oily. The inside of the toilet is caked with sedimentary layers of mold, piss, and what looks like either diarrhea or vomit. Roy wishes he had a mask, or a goddamn hazmat suit. 

He keeps the door open, because of the bleach fumes and the mold, which is why he hears it when Ed, in the next room, says “What the _fuck?_ ”

“What?” Roy calls. He’s standing over the toilet, handfuls of moldy paper towels in his hands, sweat running into his eyes. Ed better not need a hand right now. 

Ed doesn’t answer. There’s silence from the next room. 

Roy sighs, tosses the paper towels into a garbage bag, and shucks off the rubber gloves. Taking a moment to wipe the sweat off his forehead, he steps out into the fresh air and around the corner to the bedroom. 

His first instinct is annoyance; Ed hasn’t made much progress. The room’s still mostly full of books, and instead of working through them Ed’s sitting on the floor next to an old cardboard carton, the kind you get with printer paper, stuffed with a poorly organized stack of manila folders. There are papers spread out on the carpet all around Ed, who’s sitting cross-legged with his back to the futon. It’s mostly gas and electric bills, from what Roy can tell, but there’s also a little picture frame with a photo of four people: a bearded man, a woman with dark hair, a blond toddler, and a baby. 

It’s Ed and Al and their parents, Roy realizes. It’s what Al was hoping they’d find here. 

It’s not what Ed’s looking at. He’s got a folder open on his lap, a stack of papers several fingers deep. From where Roy’s standing, they just look like bills, but from the look on Ed’s face, there’s something more going on. He looks _horrified_. 

“What’s up?” Roy asks. Ed shakes his head. His mouth’s set in a stubborn, queasy line. He passes the folder to Roy and pinches the bridge of his nose hard. 

“It was behind the bookcase,” he says, nodding briefly towards the far corner. Roy nods, opening the folder.

It’s a bunch of medical bills. Roy scans the letterhead: _Maine Medical Center Cancer Institute._ “Wait,” he says. “He had cancer?” 

Ed nods. His face is still hidden in his hand. Roy flips through the file: radiology bills, surgery charges. He’s not doing the math, but if he did, he suspects it would add up to a cool hundred thousand. Whatever kind of insurance the old man had, it wasn’t good. 

“They didn’t say anything about that in the autopsy,” he says, nonplussed. “Ms. Rockbell told me it was just heart failure—old age. How’d they miss something like that?”

Ed shakes his head. He picks up an electrical bill off the floor and starts shredding it remorselessly, hurling the scraps onto the dirty carpet. “Look at the dates,” he says. His voice is shaking.

Roy does. The bill in his hand is from 2007. 

“Wait.” He’s doing frantic arithmetic in his head, even though he already knows the answer in his gut before he’s done subtracting. “That was—”

“—the year he left. Yeah,” Ed finishes for him. “That’s why.” He’s _angry_ , Roy realizes. It’s radiating off of him, so sharp and unmistakable Roy almost wants to step away. 

He doesn’t. He keeps reading the file. It was lung cancer, apparently, stage III—diagnosed in November of 2006, he reads on one of the papers. There’s a series of chemotherapy bills, a doctor’s note suggesting a new course of medication to manage nausea, and from October 2007, there’s a massive bill for a bilobectomy, with a bunch of invoices from follow-up visits and appointments with a respiratory therapist. Roy sifts through several months’ worth of blood test results and notices of nonpayment, and finds a letter from a Lyra Dante, M.D. dated March 10, 2008. A single word in the letter leaps off the page, blinking up at Roy.  
  


“He was in remission.” He looks up at Ed, who’s started poking at the remaining folders in the carton. “This is from seven years ago.” 

“Yup,” Ed says. He opens a folder, flips through its contents, and throws it back in the box. “Clean bill of health, every year for seven years. Old man got lucky. He was in remission when he died,” he finishes, opening another folder. 

“So it was just a heart attack.” Roy’s trying to wrap his head around what any of this means. If he was sick when he left, was that _why_ he left—not a fight, like with Chris, but to keep his illness away from his family? Roy’s heard of people doing shit like that, trying to save the people who love them the pain of watching them die. It’s fucked up, but cancer makes people stupid. Worse than that, it makes them scared. But if that was the reason, why disappear forever? Why not come back when the fear subsided; when things got better and the cancer was gone? He checks the letter from Dr. Dante again. _March 10, 2008._

Roy was in Rizembul on March 10, 2008. Roy was in Hohenheim’s children’s house, watching bad television and answering the phone when people called with condolences and news and questions about where to bring flowers and casseroles. The accident was in late February, and Al got out of the hospital in July. Roy feels a strange, icy feeling spreading in his gut. 

He would have remembered if it had been his dad on one of those calls. He’d have recognized his voice; he’d have noticed if someone called expecting Trisha to answer. _Wouldn’t he?_ He’s gripped, suddenly, with a completely irrational certainty that it was him, seven years ago, who broke the news of Trisha’s death to his own father, not realizing who he was talking to. 

He shakes his head. That’s stupid. There’s no reason to believe he’d have talked to Hohenheim without figuring out who he was. But he must have found out somehow. If not from Roy, then from somebody. 

And he’d stayed away. Seven years, cancer free, sending his monthly checks down to Pinako’s house the whole time. _Old man got lucky_. 

Now he’s passed his kids on to Roy, like some kind of unpaid debt, without a word to anyone, without a letter or a call or a fucking text. “Jesus Christ,” Roy says slowly. He’s not torn anymore. He’s ready to hate the guy. 

Ed doesn’t say anything. He’s been quiet for a few minutes, frozen over the last folder he picked up. Roy glances over and watches him lift one of the pages with a shaking hand and flip it over gingerly, as if he’s handling some precious archival document that might crumble in his grip. He sucks in a harsh breath and holds it, staring at the paper in his hand with a look unlike anything Roy’s seen before. 

“What is it?” he asks. Ed blinks twice, closing his eyes. The paper starts to shake. Roy watches with growing concern. 

“She knew,” Ed whispers. “She knew about it.” 

Roy doesn’t have to ask who. He can see the papers in the folder are letters, written on notebook paper in a neat, swirling hand. He can hear the pain in Ed’s voice. 

“I’m sorry,” is all he says. It’s all he can think to say. He wants to be able to say something better, and he’s coming up empty. 

“ _Fuck_ it,” Ed says, dropping the letter back on the pile, slamming the folder shut and shoving it back in the box. He sits back against the futon, his arms crossed over his face, shoulders shaking. “Fuck this.” He looks up at Roy. “Did Granny know? She must’ve, right? Did she—” He breaks off, breathing hard. “Don’t fucking tell me _you’re_ the only adult who never lied to me.” 

Roy doesn’t know the answer to that. “I’m sorry, Ed,” he says again. 

“I gotta get out of here,” Ed says, pushing himself up off the floor. He teeters wildly as he tries to get his feet under him, grabbing at the nearest bookcase. “I can’t breathe.” He pushes past Roy, out of the bedroom; Roy can hear one of the precarious towers of books falling as Ed stumbles through the living room to the front door. 

Roy doesn’t follow him right away; he’s pretty confident Ed doesn’t want his company right now, and besides, he’s morbidly curious. Crouching down, he picks up the letter Ed was just holding. It’s dated summer 2007; half a year after Hohenheim took off. “ _My darling,_ ” it begins, “ _I miss you. The boys miss you. I got your letter…_ ”

Roy puts it back. He can’t keep reading; this is something too private, too personal, too painful in a way that doesn’t affect Roy and yet feels like a punch in the gut to read. If it feels that way to him, he can only imagine what Ed’s feeling right now. He looks down at the framed photograph at his feet, at the toddler in Hohenheim’s arms. He’s grinning at the camera with the kind of ferocious, unselfconscious joy kids lose somewhere along the way. 

He finds Ed smoking on the stoop, staring out into the thick trees across the road. He’s got the lighter in his hand still, flicking it obsessively in a rhythm Roy can’t follow. 

“My leg hurts,” he says, his back still to Roy. 

“Do you need something?” 

Ed shakes his head. “No. It just really fucking hurts.” He leans forward, kneading at his thigh, frowning. “All day and all last night. My arm too.” He sighs. “It gets like this sometimes. I dunno.” 

“That’s a trauma response,” Roy says. Ed twists around to frown up at him quizzically. Roy shrugs. “I knew a guy. Six tours in Iraq. On the last one, his Jeep hit an IED outside of Mosul. He lost both his legs. Said the pain’s always worst when he’s having trouble forgetting it all. Remember the other day?” he says. “You said you got carsick after the accident. Same principle.” He leans on the doorframe, feeling the cool breeze on his face. “Bodies remember things.” 

“Huh,” Ed says. He rubs his leg again, wincing hard. “That makes sense.” 

“I know what I’m talking about sometimes,” Roy says. 

He means it as a joke, not a very good one, but Ed freezes and then starts to laugh in a way that doesn’t feel like a reaction to humor on Roy’s part so much as some kind of involuntary, unpleasant reflex. He laughs until he’s coughing, his whole body bent double on the step. 

“You know,” he says finally, straightening up to look at Roy again, “I really thought you were like him.” He gestures with the hand holding the joint, counting off his points on his three unoccupied fingers. “I mean—self-righteous dick, thinks he knows everything even though he’s never fucking there, throws money at us and fucks off. That’s why I hated you, by the way,” he adds. 

“Past tense,” Roy says lightly. It’s a question as much as an observation. 

“Maybe,” Ed says. “I don’t know. But,” he goes on, rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand, “I guess I was wrong. Al thought I was wrong.” 

Roy’s surprised by how much that affects him: the idea that, in some private conversation, Al defended him to Ed. He loves these kids, he realizes. Ed with his overactive heart and brain; Al with his quiet, stubborn confidence. They’re good kids. What was it Hughes said? They’re just people. 

He steps out of the doorway and sits down beside Ed, matching his gaze out to the road. Every few minutes, a car sails past, but right now it’s quiet, just them and the birds and the muted frenzy of late-spring black flies in the forest. 

“Where do you get it, by the way?” he asks Ed. “The pot.” 

“Nobody calls it pot anymore, dumbass,” Ed says. “And I get it from Granny.” He shrugs. “She said I’d just get it somewhere else. And it’s good for pain.” 

“Huh,” Roy says. 

“What?” Ed turns to glare at him. “You’re gonna turn her in or something once you sign the papers? I knew you were a cop, but Jesus.” 

“I’m a chemical officer,” Roy says. “Advisory. It’s mainly chemical engineering research. And I just figured I should know. You know,” he adds, “if you still think I should sign those papers.” 

Ed doesn’t answer for a minute. He’s picking at a loose piece of rubber on the sole of his boots, worrying at the plastic with such intense focus Roy almost thinks he hasn’t heard. But: “yeah,” he says, finally. “Yeah, I think you should.” 

“Okay then,” Roy says. It’s settled. They still have to talk to Al, still have to discuss things with Pinako and figure out a situation that works for everybody, and after that there’s still the courts to deal with, but Roy’s not really worried about any of that. The real problem, the thing keeping them from moving forward, was between him and Ed, and it’s gone now. Underneath it all—the rage at a man who’s been as good as dead to him for years, the looming stress of the house full of books at their backs—he feels stupidly, unexpectedly happy. 

For a long time, they sit together in silence, watching the cars go by, feeling the afternoon cool into evening. Ed goes back to clicking the lighter, watching the flame jump up and die over and over again in his hand. 

“We should go back in,” Roy says finally. “The bugs are starting to come out. I can finish the bedroom,” he adds. 

Ed shakes his head. He’s staring at the flame in his hand. “I don’t want to,” he says. 

Roy frowns. “We have to clean the rest of the place out.”

“If we want to sell it,” Ed says. “I don’t want to sell it. Who’s gonna want to buy that?” 

“You want to _keep_ it?” Roy asks, incredulous, but Ed shakes his head again. He looks up at Roy, flicking the lighter. 

“Why don’t we just burn it down?” 

Roy is aware, in this moment, that he’s hearing the first of what will surely be many, many very bad ideas that Ed will propose to him over the next two years. He is conscious that this one is an _extremely_ bad idea. It’s irresponsible; it’s dangerous; it’s moderately illegal. Ed’s grinning at him, lighter in hand.

“Fuck it,” he says. “Okay.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


In the end, it’s not so much “fuck it” as it is “let’s call the fire department, make sure the gas and electric are turned off, remove all the hazardous materials from the structure, and _then_ fuck it.” Roy’s a volunteer firefighter, after all. He knows the right and the wrong way to burn down a house. Besides, he’s about to try to get custody of two minors; the last things he needs are charges for arson and attempted insurance fraud. 

Ed complains about all this, but he doesn’t fight too hard. He’s tired. Roy makes all the calls before close of business, but the gas company can’t come out to shut the utilities off until tomorrow, so he finds them a motel down the road and loads Ed and their bags into the car again. There’s no point in spending another night in a place that packed with mold and bad memories. 

At the motel, Ed calls Al and goes straight to bed at 8 pm. Roy steps out into the hallway to give Ed privacy while they talk, and when he comes back Ed’s passed out, curled up under the covers with a sharp pinch in his forehead. 

He wakes at least twice during the night while Roy’s awake, both times gasping in fear or pain; both times he rolls over and ignores Roy when he asks if he’s okay. The second time, Roy hears him get up after a while and shuffle into the bathroom, where the water runs for a long time before Ed comes back, flopping onto the bed again with a little sigh. 

“Everything okay?” Roy asks. There’s a little green light flashing on the ceiling; he’s been trying to count the seconds between flashes for a while. He watches it spark again in the darkness, and loses count after four. 

Ed hums; it’s not yes and it’s not no. “It still hurts,” he says after a long pause. The green light sparks again. 

“You want some ice?” Roy offers. 

  
Ed considers that for a minute. “Sure,” he says finally. 

Roy gets up in the dark and puts on his shoes to go down the hall to the ice machine. He fills the bucket, wincing a little at the uncompromising racket as the chunks clatter into the little plastic tub, and heads back to the room. He scoops out handfuls of smooth, weeping ice cubes and wraps them in the thin little hand towels from the bathroom, then wraps those in the extra ice bags and ties the ends off. It’s extremely makeshift, but he figures it’ll do better than nothing. 

“Thanks,” Ed says when Roy hands him the MacGyvered ice packs. He settles one on each stump, propping them securely with the wadded sheets, and lies back gratefully. “Yeah. That helps.” 

“Try to rest,” Roy says. He doesn’t say sleep. It might not happen. “If there’s anything else you need, just give a shout.” 

“Will do, captain,” Ed says wearily. He’s got his left arm flung over his eyes. 

“I’m a colonel,” Roy says. 

“Right. Colonel.” 

They drive back to the house the next morning, where the gas and electric guys are waiting along with the fire chief. Roy talks to them while Ed goes inside, emerging after a while with the battered paper carton, mostly filled with the books for Al, plus a couple of folders and the little picture frame. He carries it all over to the car and loads it carefully inside, his face unreadable. Roy sees him slip the photograph out of the box, study it for a minute, and put it back, shutting the lid. 

“You’re sure you don’t want to sell it,” the fire chief’s asking. Roy turns his attention back to him, and shakes his head. 

“Too much trouble, I’m afraid, sir,” he says. “What with both of us being out of state. I’d rather give the department a training opportunity.” 

“If you say so,” the chief says. “Well, I appreciate you calling. I’ll have them send the trucks over.”

“Thank you,” Roy says. He’s watching Ed by the car. “Listen,” he says suddenly, “would it be okay if my brother lights it? When you give the go-ahead, of course. There’s a—sentimental value,” he explains. 

The chief shrugs. “I don’t see why not.” 

Several hours later, with half of the Cumberland County Volunteer Fire Corps ranged around the yard, Ed and Roy watch the cabin go up in flames, licking outward from the match that Ed dropped onto a bundle of kindling in the living room. The fire moves slowly, and then suddenly very fast, racing up the side of the worn gray clapboard, peeling the paint off the rusty roof. It’s loud, like a localized windstorm tearing through the house, blowing out the windows with an amplified crackle of flying glass. The smoke’s thick enough to sting their eyes. 

“We should get on the road soon,” Roy says eventually, after the roof caves in and the structure turns into a column of smoke, with trainees running around, wrestling hoses and radios. “Sun’s going down soon. We can probably get to Boston tonight if we start in the next hour.” 

Ed nods. He doesn’t take his eyes off the flames. “Just a little longer,” he says. 

Roy nods. “Okay.” They can wait a little longer. 

They stand side by side on the gravel driveway, watching the fire, until the little house is nothing but smoke and burnt spars of wood, pushing up into the darkening evening sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never been to Maine. Nor have I been to Missouri, served in the U.S. Army, or used a prosthetic. I've done some research, but acknowledge the limits of my understanding. Sorry to anyone who lives in Maine, or who otherwise detects the gaps in my knowledge. I have, however, driven *almost* the exact route that Roy and Ed take in this fic. 
> 
> This story is set in 2015. I don't really have any reason for that, but it came to me when I started writing and I stuck with it. Similarly, I made an arbitrary decision to go with real-world places for everything, but keep the name "Rizembul" (going with the spelling I don't usually use for ~variety). I took care not to actually locate AU!Rizembul in a specific place in the real world, but fwiw I had western (not West) Virginia in mind. 
> 
> I might turn this into a series! Only time will tell if I actually do that, but all of this is essentially set up for a pretty fun set of premises with which to play, and I've got some ideas in mind. Stay tuned, maybe? (If there's something you'd like to see happen in this universe, drop it in the comments or send me a message @happymeatgoodtaste on tumblr & maybe I can make it happen!)
> 
> Finally, if you enjoyed this fic, please go listen to "I Love You" by Said the Whale and think about Ed and Roy. Just do it. Thanks everyone.


End file.
